Dorothy Day is one of the most amazing and influential
Catholics of the twentieth century and perhaps one of the most paradoxical. She
was called a Communist in her life time – and she maintained friendship with at
least some communists. But she was also lauded by a pope addressing the US Congress.
A public woman, a prayerful woman, “conservative” in theology and who knows how
to describe her politics.
I just finished a book by her youngest grandchild, Kate
Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate
Portrait of My Grandmother.
It is a work which is both tender and pointed, revealing
Dorothy and her daughter Tamar in their humanness, in their struggles, in their
challenges, and finally with a touch of beauty.
It is an antidote to hagiography:
Dorothy is in danger of being lost
in all her wild and varied ways, her complexities, her contradictions, and this
sense of power that defies description.
Yet I think the book is inadequately sub-titled. It is a
memoir, very intimate, of Dorothy Day and her daughter Tamar Hennessy, through
the eyes, ears, and heart of the memories of a granddaughter.
Kate Hennessy has a way with words – or maybe it’s just her
gift from her grandmother (and others) that she shares. She also has a way of
choosing stories and tales that open us to an intimate portrait of Dorothy Day.
Kate Hennessy has a way of capturing her mother, her grandmother,
and her own life in a few words, images, and selected events.
Writing of her 1967 summer at the Catholic Worker farm, she
notes:
I returned home to Vermont
freckled, happy, and with a head full of lice.
Reading, I realized Dorothy Day’s great affection for her
grandchildren and her extraordinary way of trying to teach them.
It was after a long stay at the
beach that Dorothy wrote, “We need a reverence for the earth. Everything comes
from the earth. Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov kissed the earth. . .
. I took my grandchildren one day out at the Peter Maurin Farm and said, ‘Come
on out and let’s kiss the earth.’ Such a strange, mysterious, and beautiful
concept— man being part of the earth.”
Writing of her mother and
grandmother, she reveals how her grandmother wanted so much to do well with her
daughter:
“What I really
want,” said Tamar, who already had a habit of taking in stray animals, “is a
hedgehog. They are little and not at all prickly if you train them, and they
are very bad for cockroaches. But they like to curl up in garbage cans so you
are liable to throw them out if you are not careful.” So Dorothy put an appeal
in the paper asking if anyone had a hedgehog to donate to the Worker.
There were times I
was touched by the pain between mother and daughter – and by the difficulties
both experienced. As Kate Hennessy wrote of Tamar:
“You don’t grow up until you
forgive your parents,” my mother said the year before she died.
Hard as it might be, Kate Hennessy has caught part of the
genius – sanctity – of her grandmother.
As always Dorothy wrote beautifully
about what was wrapped in tragedy. Part of her genius was this ability to see
beauty in what didn’t seem to possess it….
Dorothy wrote of bitter, bitter
things in a way that gave them beauty and grace…
When she did describe things as
they were, she soon discovered that people preferred to hear the good. But she
also saw beauty where many couldn’t. She saw things in all of us that lay
beyond the ragged threads of our miseries.
This also might be part of the struggle between mother and
daughter, a daughter who suffered much, including what she felt was a mother
who didn’t seem to always see and acknowledge the pain in her own life. Perhaps
Tamar felt that Dorothy didn’t realize what Kate Hennessy says that her mother once
said: “Everyone must live their own disasters.”
Dorothy Day comes real – full of wit, though also a bit of
the invective. In her last years, her wit came through:
She still had moments of her quick
wit and sense of the absurd, though. When she answered a phone call in the
middle of the night, a strange man’s voice said, “I’ve decided to renew our
affair.”
“It’s too late,” Dorothy replied. “I’m eighty-two.” And she hung up. Dorothy had a
“It’s too late,” Dorothy replied. “I’m eighty-two.” And she hung up. Dorothy had a
Kate Hennessy writes with wit:
Dorothy’s history with cars was a
history of gas pedals going through the floor, gear sticks coming off in her
hand, the battery falling out onto the ground just as she arrived home, or
windshield wipers breaking off in the middle of heavy rainstorms.
She writes with insight:
Tamar’s nonjudgmental nature led Dorothy
to regret her outbursts and to once again appreciate Tamar’s peaceful and
uncritical nature. “I could learn from her,” she said.
And she writes with love, helping us to see how Christ and
God understand us as her grandmother said:
Christ understands us when we fail,
she said, and God understands us when we try to love.
Read this book and take it to heart.
I also recommend that you read Dorothy Day’s The Long
Loneliness. I used this book a few times at the end of a university course at
Iowa State University on “Introduction to Catholicism” as a way to show Catholicism
made flesh in a twentieth century woman.
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I also recommend the work of my friend Jim Forest, All Is
Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day. It is a loving portrait with plenty of
photos and quotes.
Dorothy, the real Dorothy, should inspire us to live with love and joy, in the little things we can do:
“What we do is very little. But it is like the little boy with a few loaves and fishes. Christ took that little and increased it. He will do the rest. What we do is so little we may seem to be constantly failing. But so did He fail. He met with apparent failure on the Cross. But unless the seed fall into the earth and die, there is no harvest. And why must we see results? Our work is to sow.”
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