a blanket of silence

woodcut by Harlan Hubbard

Advent is a time of waiting, 

     of expectation, 

          of silence.  

Waiting for our Lord to be born. 

A pregnant woman is so happy, 

     so content. 

She lives in such a garment of silence, 

and it is as though she were listening to hear 

     the stir of life within her. 

One always hears the stirring compared to 

     the rustling of a bird in the hand. 

But the intentness with which one awaits such stirring 

     is like nothing so much 

          as a blanket of silence.  

Dorothy Day

He asked for nothing for himself

Talk about radical. Talk about prophetic and holy. I don't know if, in my lifetime, I have encountered a person quite as clear as Peter Maurin. So clear that he is somewhat hidden.

Even now, he's known mostly through Dorothy Day. Not directly.

This is the 70th anniversary of his death and NCR has an article.

https://www.ncronline.org/news/environment/peter-maurins-farm-rooted-vision-gains-ground-among-catholic-workers

"He asked nothing for himself, so he got nothing," Dorothy Day wrote in Loaves and Fishes of Peter Maurin.

Day once said that Maurin's dedication to voluntary poverty was so extreme that perhaps the only possession he really valued was his mind. (He eventually surrendered that as well, experiencing an apparent stroke that made him lose his ability to think clearly several years before his death.) When Maurin died May 15, 1949, he was buried in a donated grave, wearing a donated suit.

Like Jean Vanier, he found his way as a lay man.

Dorothy & Tamar

On the 37th anniversary of Dorothy's death:

“If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms.”
— Dorothy Day
reflecting on the birth of her daughter Tamar

Dorothy Day, feminist, pacifist

Robert Ellsberg on Dorothy Day Canonization

Dorothy Day Advent Reflection

Woodcut by Harlan Hubbard

Advent is a time of waiting, of expectation, of silence.  Waiting for our Lord to be born. A pregnant woman is so happy, so content. She lives in such a garment of silence, and it is as though she were listening to hear the stir of life within her. One always hears the stirring compared to the rustling of a bird in the hand. But the intentness with which one awaits such stirring is like nothing so much as a blanket of silence.  Dorothy Day

- See more at: http://cjd.org/2014/11/21/dorothy-days-reflections-on-advent/#sthash.ZXNu16px.dpuf

The Friendship and Correspondence of Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day (Perseverance)

A 6-minute segment of a talk given by Jim Forest in April at St Francis College in Brooklyn.

A couple of excerpts (my selections):

Merton was and remains a controversial figure. Though he was a member of a monastic order well known for silence and for its distance from worldly affairs, Merton was outspoken on various topics that many regard as very worldly affairs. Merton was a critic of much that was happening in the world and also a critic of a Christianity in which religious identity is submerged in national identity....

...Though their vocations were different, it wasn’t only Merton who was a contemplative....

...“My constant prayer,” Dorothy confided to Merton just before Christmas in 1959, “is for final perseverance — to go on as I am trusting always the Lord Himself will take me by the hair of the head like [the prophet] Habakkuk and set me where he wants me.”

Anyone who has ever been part of any intentional community will recall how stressful it can be even when there are no dark clouds, but when it is a community that opens its doors day and night to people in urgent need, people who would not often be on anyone’s guest list, and when it is a community with very strong-willed, often argumentative, ideologically-driven volunteers, it can at times be like life in a hurricane.

In one letter to Merton, Dorothy speaks in detail about the bitterness animating some of the criticisms directed at her by co-workers. She senses the motivation of some of those who come to help at the Catholic Worker is less love than a “spirit of rebellion.” [DD to TM, October 10, 1960] Many who knew her and were aware of the emotional and physical strains of Catholic Worker life were astonished that Dorothy persevered from the founding of the Catholic Worker in 1933 until her death in 1980 — forty-seven years as part of a community of hospitality.

In his response, Merton noted that “more and more one sees that [perseverance] is the great thing,” but he also points out that perseverance is much more than “hanging on to some course which we have set our minds to, and refusing to let go.” It can sometimes mean “not hanging on but letting go. That of course is terrible. But as you say so rightly, it is a question of [God] hanging on to us, by the hair of the head, that is from on top and beyond, where we cannot see or reach.”

This was a matter of acute importance to Merton personally, a monk with itchy feet who repeatedly was attracted to greener monastic pastures. Dorothy was all for Merton staying put. In a later letter, Dorothy remarks, “I have a few friends who are always worrying about your leaving the monastery but from the letters of yours that I read I am sure you will hold fast. I myself pray for final perseverance most fervently having seen one holy old priest suddenly elope with a parishioner. I feel that anything can happen to anybody at any time.” [DD to TM, March 17, 1963]

Both Merton and Dorothy remain remarkable models, not just for persevering — barnacles can do that — but for continually putting down deeper roots while rediscovering a sense of its being God’s will not to uproot themselves.

HT: Jim Forest

A Series of 6 short films on Dorothy Day

A series of six short films on Dorothy Day

Part I
Sainthood cause for Dorothy Day (4 min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyVN1VZcGJs&list=UUDfNrxA5dMp0co1siQOLrjg&index=5

Part II
Who is Dorothy Day? (5 min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CphJLmS8-Fc&list=UUDfNrxA5dMp0co1siQOLrjg&index=3

Part III
Dorothy Day's unpopular stance  (5 min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7s09HNJIZI&list=UUDfNrxA5dMp0co1siQOLrjg&index=2

Part IV
A high regard for saints
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJY-DM-cAvI

Part V
The movement flourishes after Dorothy Day's death
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC-X5rGOoPI

Part VI
A desire to keep the saint real
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IclJJfBg3_E

Dorothy Day died 32 years ago today, UPDATED

"The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us? When we begin to take the lowest place, to wash the feet of others, to love our brothers with that burning love, that passion, which led to the Cross, then we truly say, 'Now I have begun'"

-- Dorothy Day
Loaves and Fishes, p 210 (the last chapter, titled "Our Day")

 Dorothy Day funeral, photo by Jim Forest

Photo of Cardinal Terence Cooke outside the Nativity Catholic Church before Dorothy's funeral Mass.  Paul Moore, the Episcopal Bishop of New York, is beside him.

From Robert Ellsburg: "I don't know whether Cardinal Cooke wanted to hold the funeral at St. Patrick's. I know he offered to celebrate the funeral mass [at Nativity Church on 2nd Avenue, close to the Catholic Worker] but wanted to change the time because of a prior commitment. This would have interfered with the schedule for the soup line and Tamar [Dorothy's daughter] among others didn't want to do that. Cooke did graciously offer to come down and bless her casket at the entrance to the church. … I don't know whether Cooke greeted everyone who arrived. I thought he left after the blessing of the casket. Some people have said they believe he stuck his head in the side door of the church during the service. I didn't see this, but it is possible. He later celebrated a memorial mass for Dorothy at the cathedral."

HT: Jim Forest

Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Jim Forest

Jim Forest speaking at the Nazareth Retreat Center in Pittsburgh, October 15, 2011. (The guy next to me had a "Smartpen" - see LiveScribe.com!  I had never seen one in action before.)

Over the weekend I went to a "day retreat" on Dorothy Day, led by Jim Forest, in North Pittsburgh.  I have corresponded for awhile with Jim about Thomas Merton, and was honored to be able to meet him in person.

His person carries a profound presence and sincerity that I could only glimpse from his internet persona.  I was quite blown away.  I can see why both Merton and Dorothy Day were drawn to him as a young man, and trusted and believed in him.  He is, as far as I can tell, one of the most reliable writers alive to carry on their legacies.  Jim speaks simply and in that simplicity is much truth and power.

I met several people at the event that know people that I know from my Florida peace and justice connections.  It was held at a Nazareth Retreat Center that felt very familiar to my own Kentucky roots.

Here is a link to a US Catholic interview with Jim about the friendship between Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton. (Thanks, Bryan!)

This is the Nazareth Center, which looks very much like the Nazareth in KY.

Dorothy Day attended silent retreats here which were led by a Pittsburgh priest, Fr. John Hugo. Fr. Hugo was a spiritual guide to Dorothy.  

This is the chapel where Dorothy prayed.

the bomb

The Catholic Worker, September 1945
http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/daytext.cfm?TextID=554
We Go on Record

By Dorothy Day

Mr. Truman was jubilant. President Truman. True man; what a strange name, come to think of it. We refer to Jesus Christ as true God and true Man. Truman is a true man of his time in that he was jubilant. He was not a son of God, brother of Christ, brother of the Japanese, jubilating as he did. He went from table to table on the cruiser which was bringing him home from the Big Three conference, telling the great news; "jubilant" the newspapers said. Jubilate Deo. We have killed 318,000 Japanese.

That is, we hope we have killed them, the Associated Press, on page one, column one of the Herald Tribune, says. The effect is hoped for, not known. It is to be hoped they are vaporized, our Japanese brothers -- scattered, men, women and babies, to the four winds, over the seven seas. Perhaps we will breathe their dust into our nostrils, feel them in the fog of New York on our faces, feel them in the rain on the hills of Easton.

Jubilate Deo. President Truman was jubilant. We have created. We have created destruction. We have created a new element, called Pluto. Nature had nothing to do with it.

"A cavern below Columbia was the bomb's cradle," born not that men might live, but that men might be killed. Brought into being in a cavern, and then tried in a desert place, in the midst of tempest and lightning, tried out, and then again on the eve of the Feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord Jesus Christ, on a far off island in the eastern hemisphere, tried out again, this "new weapon which conceivably might wipe out mankind, and perhaps the planet itself."

"Dropped on a town, one bomb would be equivalent to a severe earthquake and would utterly destroy the place. A scientific brain trust has solved the problem of how to confine and release almost unlimited energy. It is impossible yet to measure its effects."

"We have spent two billion on the greatest scientific gamble in history and won," said President Truman jubilantly.

The papers list the scientists (the murderers) who are credited with perfecting this new weapon. One outstanding authority "who earlier had developed a powerful electrical bombardment machine called the cyclotron, was Professor O. E. Lawrence, a Nobel prize winner of the University of California. In the heat of the race to unlock the atom, he built the world's most powerful atom smashing gun, a machine whose electrical projectiles carried charges equivalent to 25,000,000 volts. But such machines were found in the end to be unnecessary. The atom of Uranium-235 was smashed with surprising ease. Science discovered that not sledgehammer blows, but subtle taps from slow traveling neutrons managed more on a tuning technique were all that were needed to disintegrate the Uranium-235 atom."

(Remember the tales we used to hear, that one note of a violin, if that note could be discovered, could collapse the Empire State Building. Remember too, that God's voice was heard not in the great and strong wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire, but "in the whistling of a gentle air.")

Scientists, army officers, great universities (Notre Dame included), and captains of industry -- all are given credit lines in the press for their work of preparing the bomb -- and other bombs, the President assures us, are in production now.

Great Britain controls the supply of uranium ore, in Canada and Rhodesia. We are making the bombs. This new great force will be used for good, the scientists assured us. And then they wiped out a city of 318,000. This was good. The President was jubilant.

Today's paper with its columns of description of the new era, the atomic era, which this colossal slaughter of the innocents has ushered in, is filled with stories covering every conceivable phase of the new discovery. Pictures of the towns and the industrial plants where the parts are made are spread across the pages. In the forefront of the town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee is a chapel, a large comfortable-looking chapel benignly settled beside the plant. And the scientists making the first tests in the desert prayed, one newspaper account said.

Yes, God is still in the picture. God is not mocked. Today, the day of this so great news, God made a madman dance and talk, who had not spoken for twenty years. God sent a typhoon to damage the carrier Hornet. God permitted a fog to obscure vision and a bomber crashed into the Empire State Building. God permits these things. We have to remember it. We are held in God's hands, all of us, and President Truman too, and these scientists who have created death, but will use it for good. He, God, holds our life and our happiness, our sanity and our health; our lives are in His hands. He is our Creator. Creator.

And as I write, Pigsie, who works in Secaucus, New Jersey, feeding hogs, and cleaning out the excrement of the hogs, who comes in once a month to find beauty and surcease and glamour and glory in the drink of the Bowery, trying to drive the hell and the smell out of his nostrils and his life, sleeps on our doorstep, in this best and most advanced and progressive of all possible worlds. And as I write, our cat, Rainbow, slinks by with a shrill rat in her jaws, out of the kitchen closet here at Mott Street. Here in this greatest of cities which covered the cavern where this stupendous discovery was made, which institutes an era of unbelievable richness and power and glory for man ….

Everyone says, "I wonder what the Pope thinks of it?" How everyone turns to the Vatican for judgement, even though they do not seem to listen to the voice there! But our Lord Himself has already pronounced judgement on the atomic bomb. When James and John (John the beloved) wished to call down fire from heaven on their enemies, Jesus said:

"You know not of what spirit you are. The Son of Man came not to destroy souls but to save." He said also, "What you do unto the least of these my brethren, you do unto me."

Note: louie louie previously marked the U. S. bombings of the Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9) HERE.  Thomas Merton's poem, Original Child Bomb is HERE.

Dorothy Day - November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980

"Dorothy Day is one of the greatest and most significant Catholics of the twentieth century. Today is the 30th anniversary of her death."

 - From an essay by Fr. Stephen Wang, which can be found here. 

Robert Ellsburg, in a short life, says of Dorothy:

"The enigma of Dorothy Day was her ability to reconcile her radical social positions (she called herself an anarchist as well as a pacifist) with a traditional and even conservative piety. Her commitment to poverty, obedience, and chastity was as firm as any nun’s. But she remained thoroughly immersed in the secular world with all the “precarity” and disorder that came with life among the poor."

more Dorothy

I can't say enough about these videos of Dorothy Day. Here are 3 more 10-minute videos, this time an interview with Hubert Jessup. Dorothy tells about the beginning of the Catholic Worker Movement, her Catholic faith, Peter Maurin, etc.

part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/user/4854derrida#p/u/5/tRSjY_4fFfc

part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/user/4854derrida#p/u/4/kR_6miCs7FA

part 3:
http://www.youtube.com/user/4854derrida#p/u/3/cp8TLypf4hY

Dorothy Day on TV

These 3 videos are a real treat. A half hour video, broken down into 3 10-minute segments of a an interview with Dorothy Day and Tom Cornell, then secretary of the Catholic Peace Fellowship. Tom looks so young!

part 1) http://www.youtube.com/user/4854derrida#p/u/2/rNMHud0fFUg

part 2) http://www.youtube.com/profile?gl=US&user=4854derrida#p/a/u/1/zZXZmuRekyE

part 3) http://www.youtube.com/profile?gl=US&user=4854derrida#p/a/u/0/CKrj5PGPw6k

I have read books about Dorothy, read her diaries, and seen many photos of her. But I have never been able to get a handle on who Dorothy was, and how she was. This interview makes her "real" to me. The woman Merton knew, admired, and followed.

It also reminds me of the hope of a "radical Catholicism" that was once apparent, but now seems to have gone underground. Where is it?

A Prayer for Dorothy Day

Today is the birthday of Dorothy Day, who was born on November 8, 1897.

O Dorothy, I think of you and the beat people and the ones with nothing and the poor in virtue, the very poor, the ones no one can respect. I am not worthy to say I love all of you. Intercede for me, a stuffed shirt in a place of stuffed shirts and a big dumb phone, who has tried to be respectable and has succeeded. What a deception! I know, of course, that you are respected, too, but you have a right to be. You didn’t jump into the most respectable possible situation and then tell everyone about it. I am worried about all this, but I am not beating myself over the head. I just think that, for the love of God, I should say it, and that, for the love of God, you should pray for me.

-Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love, p. 137

Other posts in this blog that mention Dorothy Day are here.

Some interesting photos of Dorothy and a large search-able collection of her writings are here.

Dorothy Day, photo by Vivian Cherry

The bombing of Hiroshima and the Feast of the Transfiguration

Points for meditation to be scratched on the walls of a cave.

I went to Mass this morning and the priest talked about the great feast of the Transfiguration, which is today. He did not mention the bombing of Hiroshima, which took place 64 years ago today. They go together for me. I cannot think of one without thinking of the other.

Poet-monk, Thomas Merton, wrote a poem, “Original Child Bomb,” the title being an exact translation of the Japanese word for the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

The poem is a short history written in numbered, laconic sentences about the development and first use of nuclear weapons, despite the appeal of some of the bomb’s makers that it not be used without prior warning. Nonetheless, the bomb was dropped on a city considered of minor military importance.

“The people who were near the center became nothing. The whole city was blown to bits and the ruins caught fire instantly everywhere, burning briskly. 70,000 people were killed right away or died within a few hours. Those who did not die at once suffered great pain. Few of them were soldiers.”

Merton noted the odd way that religious terms had been used by those associated with the bomb. Its first test was called Trinity. The mission to drop the Hiroshima bomb returned to Papacy, the code name for Tinian.

Dorothy Day’s response to the bombing was published in the Catholic Worker in September, 1945: “We Go on Record: the Catholic Worker Response to Hiroshima”:

Mr. Truman was jubilant. President Truman. True man; what a strange name, come to think of it. We refer to Jesus Christ as true God and true Man. Truman is a true man of his time in that he was jubilant. He was not a son of God, brother of Christ, brother of the Japanese, jubilating as he did. He went from table to table on the cruiser which was bringing him home from the Big Three conference, telling the great news; "jubilant" the newspapers said. Jubilate Deo. We have killed 318,000 Japanese.

That is, we hope we have killed them, the Associated Press, on page one, column one of the Herald Tribune, says. The effect is hoped for, not known. It is to be hoped they are vaporized, our Japanese brothers -- scattered, men, women and babies, to the four winds, over the seven seas. Perhaps we will breathe their dust into our nostrils, feel them in the fog of New York on our faces, feel them in the rain on the hills of Easton.

Jubilate Deo. President Truman was jubilant.. ...

This text is not copyrighted. However, if you use or cite this text please indicate the original publication source and this website (Dorothy Day Library on the Web at http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/). Thank you.