hospitality: Opening Heart and Home

Sojourners Magazine, Jul 2004 by Forest, Jim

Dorothy Day taught us the real meaning of hospitality by the way she lived day to day. BY JIM FOREST

EARLY IN DOSTOEVSKY'S NOVEL The Brothers Karamazov, a wealthy woman asks Starete Zosirna how she can really know that God exists, The elderly monk tells her that no explanation or argument can achieve this, only the practice of "active love,"

The woman then confesses that sometimes she dreams about a life of loving seivice to others-she thinks perhaps she will become a Sister of Mercy, live in holy poverty, and serve the poor in the humblest way. But then it: crosses her mind how ungrateful some of the people she would serve are likely to be. They would probably complain that the soup she served wasn't hot enough or that the bread wasn't fresh enough or the bed was too hard. She confesses that she couldn't bear such ingratitude-and so her dreams about serving others vanish, and once again she finds herself wondering if there really is a God. To this the Staretz responds, "Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams."

I often heard Dorothy Day recite those words. I doubt any chapter in any work of literature had so much importance for her. She had first read Dostoevsky's novel when she was in her teens. It was partly through Dostoevsky that she formed an understanding of Christianity that wasn't typically Western, seeing it not simply as an institutional structure but as a way of life in which nothing was more important than seeing Christ in others.

Of course them were many other influences. Her understanding of basic Christianity was partly shaped by the emphasis on hospitality in the Holy Rule of St. Benedict, with its requirement that "each guest must be received as if he were Christ." There was also the influence of St. Francis of Assisi, who gave an example of downward mobility rather than upward mobility, whose life was the opposite of a rags-to-riches chronicle. He was one of the sources of the stress she put on what she called "voluntary poverty."

Like St. Francis, she discovered in herself an attraction to the poor that led her to live among them. Like Francis, she was drawn to live out the most radical teachings of Jesus, including the renunciation of violence. Also like Francis, she started a movement that was meant for anyone, married or unmarried, young or old or in between.

NEITHER PRAYER NOR the sacraments were part of Dorothy Day's upbringing. Dorothy came to faith slowly and with difficulty. At age 19, she began her lifelong involvement in movements that sought to create a society of greater solidarity, in which people were less likely to be maltreated or abandoned. Nearly all her friends, activists on the left, regarded religion with contempt-a pie-in-the-sky social structure created by rich people to make the poor tolerate their own oppression. Yet Dorothy couldn't write God off quite so easily. She had a quiet envy for the faith of the many poor people she saw going into church to pray. Sometimes she followed them. There was a Catholic parish on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, St. Joseph's Church, that she would sometimes slip into. Here she experienced a kind of at-homeness and consolation. While she knew very little about Catholic belief, she felt some comfort being in a place set aside for prayer. It was reassuring to be among people who came in for some quiet minutes, their heads bowed toward the consecrated bread hidden beyond the altar that in some mysterious way had been made one with Christ during the Mass.

During the First World War, Dorothy decided it wasn't enough to be a writer when so many people were dying and so took a low-paying job as a nurse in a Brooklyn hospital. It was the beginning of living a life in which what the church calls "the works of mercy" would more and more be at the center of what she did.

In December 1932, Dorothy was assigned to write about a demonstration in Washington, D.C., called the Hunger March. The many men and women taking part in it had only reluctantly been allowed to march into Washington. For days police barricades had blocked their way. Each day headlines warned of a communist menace that bore little resemblance to the actual people who had endured insults and violence to dramatize the hardships and needs of the unemployed. Dorothy was appalled by the role of the press. "If there was not a story, the newspapers would make a story.... The newspaper reporters were infected by their own journalism and began to beg editors to give them tear-gas masks before they went out to interview the leaders of the unemployed marchers."

Yet in the end, the police moved the barricades and stood aside. "On a bright sunny day the ragged horde triumphantly with banners flying, with lettered slogans mounted on sticks, paraded three-thousand-strong through the tree-flanked streets of Washington," Dorothy wrote. "I stood on the curb and watched them, joy and pride in the courage of this band of men and women mounting in my heart."

Soon after her return to Manhattan, she met Peter Maurin, a French immigrant who knew of her through her writings and suggested she start a newspaper that would let Catholics know that that church had a social doctrine, at the heart of which is the duty of hospitality. Five months later, May Day 1933, the first issue of The Catholic Worker was handed out on Union Square.