The world will be saved by beauty
Dorothy Day teaching me about being a mother/writer/activist, and being patient on day 175 of rain in a tiny house
The world will be saved by beauty. It was Dostoyevsky who wrote something like it, but Dorothy Day, reading Russian novels with her anarchist, bohemian friends in rundown corners of New York City, said it so often that some people mistakenly attribute it to her. Day founded the Catholic Worker Movement, a movement that united two seemingly opposite forces in Day’s world- her deep care for the poor, and her deep faith. Dorothy was a writer, though. Before she was handing out coffee (only the best) and bread to hours-long lines of unemployed people in the Depression, she was writing novels. Her father was a journalist, as were two of her brothers. As a woman, she didn’t have his support the way her brother’s did, and so when she dropped out of college, she ended up writing for a leftist communist newspaper. Her activism and journalism landed her in prison a few times, and the whole time she was working on novels, trying to make ends meet through other random, part-time gigs— renting whatever rooms she could afford, staying up late into the night and walking the streets with famous poets and playwrights, holding her liquor better than some of them (during prohibition, mind you).
Dorothy Day in 1916 image courtesy of this excellent America Magazine article summarizing the biography I’m currently reading about Day, written by her granddaughter, called The World Will be Saved By Beauty.
When she gave birth to her daughter Tamar, (which seems to also coincide with her more serious steps towards full conversion to Catholicism) she suddenly entered a new chapter where art, action, parenting, and spirituality would sometimes seem to pull in opposite directions. I feel like this sometimes. Going from the “poor college student” with the energy to live on ideals and coffee, but with long, uninterrupted swathes of time to think and create, to the full-on demands of parenting and earning money sometimes feels like a 180 degree flip. (For example, while I never wandered streets with playwrights after hitting up a speakeasy, I once went to an undergraduate conference for a weekend where I lived on the free coffee and hors d'oeuvres offered at key-note addresses, and my exceptional and amazing professor put me up in her hotel room when there was a mix-up with my accommodation and I couldn’t afford a place to sleep. Enter parenthood and suddenly you’re making choices on budgets and not on ideals).
Dorothy wanted internal and external consistency, and so her faith and background in social activism for the poor led her to seek an integration of these two things. In Peter Muarin, a fellow Catholic, she was introduced to historical church teachings on social justice for the poor. As a result of this she started writing about the plight of the poor in a newspaper she founded with him, The Catholic Worker. Through the reporting and Peter’s vision of a better way, people started showing up at their door. Some asked to help with the paper, some were looking for work, some for conversation, or for purpose, or for some bread. The Worker ended up renting apartments around their office (in a very destitute part of the city) and providing housing for people who showed up, forming an unlikely revolving family of European immigrants, anarchists, striking workers, homeless and mentally ill, writers, and young idealists. Some ended up staying for years. They lived from donation to donation, there was sometimes no running water and rats abounded, but at the peak of the Seaman’s strike they were providing thousands with soup and bread every day. There was constant coming and going. There was very little peace or quiet or obvious beauty - and in this constant commotion, Dorothy, the artist and activist, was also parenting as a single mother.
There have been some amazing quotes and articles about Dorothy Day this year, as the Catholic Church considers making her a saint, but I find myself drawn to her story because I rarely find people who are navigating all of these guilt-inducing practices in one go: mothering, writing, social activism, and spirituality. Each one of those callings is so strong it threatens to pull me in entirely, and sometimes it feels like I’m circling around a kitchen that’s on fire, dashing water over my shoulder as I turn from one burning pot to the next, never giving any one enough, while on the verge of getting myself scorched.
Dorothy Day (image courtesy of this amazing New Yorker article)
Apparently Dorothy did struggle with feeling guilty about her daughter. She sent her to boarding school several times to have a better, calmer environment, where people weren’t giving (or throwing away) her daughter’s precious natural specimens she would collect as a budding scientist. But then Dorothy would feel bad about having her daughter away, and send for her to come back into the chaos of the Worker houses of hospitality. And then Dorothy would be called on a speaking tour, and send her back again. The things “required” to write: silence, solitude, a closing door -- Dorothy didn’t really have very much of any of these things -- and yet she wrote. Although, she always said the doing of the work was much more important than talking about and writing about the work (and in fact, it’s hard to find a photo of Dorothy writing until she’s much older!) she still managed to continue as a journalist for the Catholic Worker, and wrote copious letters, as well as books in her lifetime.
I was hoping to find some secret to serenity, to a full integration of a mother-writer-Christian-activist in Day, and instead I see someone pretty human, muddling her way through, doing the best she can to be consistent to her ideals, but not always knowing what that looks like in reality. On the other hand, she did it. And it seems although she and her daughter had some rocky patches, when her life ended they had reconciled their differences and were very close. Not only that, but Day was known for being a kind person. A good listener. Although my own parents don’t fit this pattern, growing up in the world of evangelical missionaries makes bit skeptical of the people who do dramatic things in the world and get a lot done, but are terribly difficult people, or who neglect their families. That is really what I take from Dorothy. In the tending of these all-consuming fires of parenting and writing and doing justice (and somehow having money to eat), I somehow also need the patience and joy she held onto. I need the eyes to see the beauty, even on a trash-littered beach. I need the eyes to see Christ in the face of the beggar at my city traffic-light, as well as the face of my own child, asking for yet another cup of milk.
Tiny House Life
We’ve had an unseasonable amount of rain lately. Like 5 days of every week. We are pretty good at playing in all weather (we have to be!) but there does come a point where I long for a bigger space for the kids to run around that doesn’t involve carrying them inside covered in mud and throwing them straight into the bath. On the other hand, we do value the outdoors! We have gotten good mileage out of home-made fishing poles with string and paperclips this week.
We are going full-on Christmas (since this picture was taken, we now have MORE lights and a mini Christmas tree sitting on the bookshelf). With the news of the new Covid variant, we are drowning our sorrows over the fact that our overseas family probably won’t come for Christmas by hanging up more lights. And more lights.
Just Beautiful Links
This spot-on article by Karen Russell about the privilege and pain of being a writing mother in this economy. Also I’m not even a Pulitzer Prize finalist, so what hope is there for me? “What I failed to guess was how profound these changes would be — it wasn’t simply that I had less time to write, time had become an entirely new substrate… Writing for a living has always been a faith game, and a child makes the maintenance of that faith infinitely more challenging.”
My poem A Psalm of Petition was published in Ekstasis magazine.
This really beautiful advent email newsletter to help you ponder your life with the same attention you give a work of art, written by an art history buff. You want more like this, right??
The Porter’s Gate has a new Advent Album out! (Listen on Spotify here).
Advent started on Sunday, but you’re not too late to do my super easy family Advent chain! :)
I had a prayer posted at Millennial Liturgies last week - for those of you making decisions.
If you want even more Dorothy Day, Tsh Harrison Warren had a great NYT newsletter about her, and Plough Magazine had a summary of some of her most profound quotes here. Whether you’re dealing with a complicated family of independent thinkers, addicts, and homeless people or just your own children on the fifth day of rain in your tinyhouse, I leave you with this quote from Dorothy Day:
“One of the objections to suffering which we do not admit is that it is undignified. It is not a wound heroically received in battle. Hay fever, colds in the head, bilious attacks, poison ivy, such like irritations which are sometimes even worse than a severe illness are, to say the least, petty and undignified. But in reality it takes heroic virtue to practice patience in little things, things which seem little to others but which afflict one with unrest and misery. Patience with each other and with each other’s bickerings. We can even offer up, however, our own lack of peace, our own worry. Since I offered all the distractions, turmoil, and unrest I felt at things going askew a few weeks ago, my petty fretting over this one and that one, I have felt much better and more able to cope with everything.”
Friends, thank you for reading! Especially as I am off social media for the next month or so, it brings me so much joy to be able to still share my words with you all. You’re welcome to reply- or comment on the post by pressing the “speech bubble” icon to join the conversation publicly.
Until the New Year!
—Steph