DOROTHY DAY:

TRAUMA AS A TEACHER

“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O men of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' “ Matthew 6: 28-32

Dorothy Day (1897-1980) was a crusader for the poor and lowly. Her life story is one of early life trauma and the struggle to find meaning amidst the messiness of life. When the stories of trauma are told by all who experience its pains and sufferings, we discover that everyone on the planet has been its subject. Traumas come in all sizes and shapes and amounts. There are the “little t” traumas, such as failing a school exam, having one's first novel rejected 100 times, getting a speeding ticket. And there are the “big T” traumas, such as divorce, the death of a child, physical/sexual abuse, and the maiming injuries of war. To be a human being is to experience the pains and sufferings of traumatic events. It is said that no one escapes the pains of existence but that suffering is optional. It depends on what we make of the pain. It depends on how we think about trauma.

Traumas change us. They change our physiology and biochemistry, our emotional responses, they affect our sleep, our eating, our social interactions, how we view ourselves against the backdrop of daily life. They can detach us from reality or they can jolt us back to life or drown us. Traumas at their core dissociate us from ourselves. Repairing the tears of trauma is a hard and complicated process. So it was for Dorothy Day. When she was quite young, she was a witness to the San Francisco earthquake, watched WWI unfold with its devastating aftermath of injured soldiers, struggled with everyone else during the Great Depression, became pregnant and chose to have an abortion amidst all the confusion of the times. There were quite enough traumas in her life to have turned her away from the life that had once afforded her opportunities for rebellion and resistance, fully submersed in the fragmentation of social structures. How did she become the Dorothy Day that is now one of the most revered icons of the modern Catholic Church and political activists?

There are no guarantees and not much evidence that one can fully escape the effects of big traumas or the cumulative little ones. There is no assurance that even with the greatest effort one would be able to calm the demons that often accompany the traumas that change us. What is worth knowing and trying is coming to some sort of terms with the reality of the trauma without becoming overwhelmed by it. It takes a different way of thinking about it. For Dorothy Day, this was a turn towards God. She says in her book From Union Square to Rome:

“ 'All of my life I has been haunted by God,' a character in one of Dostoevsky's books says. And that is the way it was with me.”

“I, too, wanted to do penance for my own sins and for the sins of the whole world, for I had a keen sense of sin, of natural imperfection and earthliness. I often felt clearly that I was being deliberately evil in my attitudes, just as I clearly recognized truth when I came across it. And the thrill of joy that stirred my heart when I came across spiritual truth and beauty never abated, never left me as I grew older.”

As far as I know, Day never directly addressed any potential connection between her early life traumas and the subsequent course of her life as an activist and servant of the poor and disenfranchised. Yet, even though we can't always draw straight lines between the punctuations of our lives, we can sometimes see how the stream has coursed through canyons and into flat lands. I imagine that it was Day's early prescience about God's role in her life that carried her into the lives of the poor and social outcasts, indeed, into all the places where evil, sin, and imperfections abounded. It is possible to see that her social activism, voluntary poverty, and being a tireless voice of the voiceless were responses to her own early life profligacy. At some point, she had transformed her self-focus into expressions of redemption and humility. She had surrendered herself entirely to the uncertainty of an unobservable presence that is called God. This was not a sacrifice for her. It was not giving up something she most dearly wanted to possess. One of the paradoxes of Day's life is that she found a measure of safety and belonging in the spiritual life, a life untested and intuitive at its core. Thinking about God and how to serve him was a new way of thinking for her, a way of thinking millennia old that hearkened back to spiritual masters and communities in the shadows of history. She gathered in the totality of the human experience of those privileged and those dispossessed and surrendered herself to a greater spirit she felt moving in her life. How she thought about this opened up new ways to be. Bearing witness to man's depravities and undeserved sufferings, she was moved to act according to the path she found. She was a journalistic voice for the poor as founder of The Catholic Worker, in 1933. She opened a soup kitchen called Hospitality House. She became involved as an anti-war activist during the Vietnam War, a supporter of Civil Rights actions, and fought for women's suffrage.

One can only imagine that a great deal of inner soul work is required to make such transformations a reality and to keep them healthy. One can imagine how deep the level of commitment must be to spend an entire life in service of the homeless and the poor. When I think about Dorothy Day and why she inspires me, I think about sacrifice, surrender, spiritual immanence and transcendence, the drive for human wholeness, integrity, how one evolves integration out of fragmentation, and how one works with the inevitable pains and sufferings to which all of us are subject and the ones we actually suffer. I think about what it takes to make a life out of the complexities of social and cultural changes that have a way of distracting and confusing us. It is instructive to remember that there is a fine line separating altruism and sacrifice. One side of the line is life-sustaining, and the other is a slow cellular death of identity. It is a hard line to tread. I believe that Dorothy Day stayed on the side that sustains life and useful work.

When I think of the whole life Dorothy Day lived, I see that how she thought about her life and the lives of others tempered what she thought. How she thought about life included discipline, commitment, humility, gratitude, surrender, connecting with others in their needs, seeing oneself as the other--as no different from the other, and especially seeing oneself as the recipient of God's love and grace.

Grace is an interesting way to think about one's life. When one has lived through pain and travail, when one has been brought low by circumstances external to oneself and especially by one's own demons, when one has worked out of the depths, then it might seem that one could claim a victory for the self and its great muscular achievements. But the opposite is often the case. Because one's way of thinking includes surrender of self and all its attachments, one is turned over to a force one can hardly comprehend but which beckons and embraces. David Brooks, in his book The Second Mountain, tells of his own turn to God as a different way of thinking:

“To be religious, as I understand it, is to perceive reality through a sacred lens, to feel that there are spiritual realities in physical, imminent things. … God is what you see and feel with and through.”

“I was struggling with the concept of surrender and grace. I didn't like Martin Luther's idea that you can't be saved by works, but only by faith. I wanted to stake out a middle ground, which I called 'participatory grace.' You'd do some good things for your fellow human, and God would sort of meet you halfway.”

It turns out that God's grace and love come to us unearned. We cannot work hard enough for good things nor commit the greatest sins and receive or be denied grace. Martin Buber said in his I and Thou that all beings and things have a relationship with the Thou that is God and it is this intimate relationship where God is our animating force that we receive God's grace and, in turn in this relationship, complete God by our good works. Our faith is God's grace. Our commitment and surrender are God's requests. His presence is intimate and eternal, immanent and transcendent, and we find him and ourselves in the ways we serve one another.

In these times of turmoil and contraction of the human values of kindness and compassion, Dorothy Day's life inspires because it shows how it is possible to return ourselves to each other and to see that what someone else needs is exactly what we need. If we see the world as broken, then we try to fix it. If we see it as wounded, then we are moved to heal it. If we see that our individual agency can't be the cause of healing without some other energy source, then we are open to the presence of spirit. And we find that what we do then flows from how we have thought about the world and its problems.

Grace comes to us as it does to the lilies of the field. We may toil and turn, pray and maneuver in so many ways, stumble and harm, covet and deny, push and pull, but we will always be humbled by how we are accepted, comforted, and loved by a spirit that does not discriminate. We can add our distinctions, divisions, hates, prejudices, and claims, and we will be forever loved. Is this not a paradoxical and miraculous way to think about the great pageant of beings and things? Don't all of us want to be loved, no matter what? How we think about love is how we think about our lives. Are we, too, devoted in faith to the everyday sacred, however you think about spirit or if you think about spirit at all?

If how you think merges I and Thou and includes spirit as a co-creator of all beings and things, then one's personal agency is naturally directed to those acts that honor and celebrate the sacred within the everyday life we lead in billions of ways. What one does is done on behalf of all by the means of service for the greater good. What we think and do lie within that overall framework of commitment and surrender. I think this is what the story of Dorothy Day's life tells me and why I chose to include her in this collection of little meditations.