Third Sunday in ordinary time. Today’s readings: Isaiah 8:23b-9:3; 1 Corinthians 1:10-13, 17; Matthew 4:12-23.
Dorothy Day in 1916The name Dorothy Day provokes a myriad of different reactions. She is synonymous with the Catholic Workers Movement that she founded. In the minds of many she evokes the image of a revolutionary woman who dedicated the greater part of her life serving the needy and striving for social change.
Day’s unvarnished style of speaking hardly spared anyone and she would certainly not fit the stereotypical idea of holiness. Yet, this 20th-century American journalist offered no resistance to Christ’s loving gaze, drawing her towards him and becoming among his most committed disciples.
The abortion she had undergone in her younger years, following a pregnancy from a short-lived relationship, had left her ill and traumatised for decades. In the wake of its medical complications and anguish she had tried to commit suicide, were it not for her friends who came to her rescue just in time to save her life. Twice.
Day’s licentious past is recounted in her semi-autobiographical novel The Eleventh Virgin, a book she later regretted writing for fear of having encouraged young women to live a life of immorality. Dorothy Day: The World Will be Saved by Beauty is an acclaimed biography by her granddaughter Kate Hennessy. Hennessy comments that many have looked at her grandmother’s life searching for the earliest signs of religious impulse to try to identify the exact moment of conversion. Yet she admits she can see no separation, no tears in the fabric in any aspect of her life. “It is all one piece,” she comments.
Nonetheless, in rereading The Eleventh Virgin, Hennessey perceives a woman who “sought out the mysterious and silent places of the heart to listen to the voice of God”.
Dorothy Day’s semi-autobiographical novel The Eleventh Virgin.
Dorothy Day: The World Will be Saved by Beauty, an acclaimed biography by her granddaughter Kate Hennessy.
Day eventually started picking up the pieces of her life and putting them together when she fell in love with Forster, a marine biologist, and who was “an anarchist and an atheist”. It was, paradoxically, her life with her husband, which oscillated between moments of intense closeness and others of division, her realisation of what her love for a man really meant, her getting pregnant and giving birth to Tamar, Kate’s mother, and the beauty of the beach and the sea, that led to a kind of spiritual awakening within her.
Day soon became aware of a deep spiritual hunger to mystery, sacrament and symbolism, eventually pushing her to enter the church in her neighbourhood. She started feeling that she was “being followed by something that desired her”.
The calling of the first disciples on the shores of Galilee – “Come after me and I will make you fishers of men” – which we read about in today’s gospel, is not different from the loving gaze that Day experienced. It is also the gaze that Christ casts on all of us, inviting us to leave behind us our nets and follow him.
Like the two pairs of fishermen brothers – Peter and Andrew, and James and John – Day grew out of her false securities which entrapped her, and gradually responded to a calling that helped her discover her contribution among the people of God.
Day grew out of her false securities which entrapped her, and gradually responded to a calling that helped her discover her contribution among the people of God
If philosopher Judith Butler is right, then responding to a call is only possible because we were indeed responsive in the first place to that call. The vulnerability to allow oneself to be called is therefore fundamental, and that’s exactly what Day had.
As we celebrate the Sunday dedicated to the Word of God today, may we renew our commitment to make ourself vulnerable to the loving gaze of Christ. May we be drawn to follow him as his disciples, in a lifelong quest to discover our unique contribution with our life in the big family that is the Church.