Book Review

Ever attentive to grace

The Duty of Delight: the diaries of Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day, the American-born founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, has long been idolised by many of her fellow believers. But even they will be astonished by the revelations in The Duty of Delight, the first edition of her previously unpublished diaries. This is a volume that is full of surprises and bound to become a classic of Christian literature.

At her death in 1980, Dorothy Day was called by the church historian David O'Brien "the most influential, interesting and significant person" in the history of American Catholicism. Almost three decades later, most American Catholics still know the general outline of her life. Born in 1897 in Brooklyn and raised in Chicago, she studied at the University of Illinois before moving to New York. There she found work with a socialist newspaper, began advocating for the poor, and took up with the Greenwich Village intelligentsia, including, most famously, the playwright Eugene O'Neill, to whom she was romantically attached.

She lived a rather dissolute life, at one point undergoing an abortion (something she omitted in her published autobiographical work). Eventually she shared a beachfront cottage with her common-law husband, Forster Batterham, and gave birth to a child, Tamar. Her daughter's birth sets in motion her conversion, in 1927, to Catholicism - as well as Forster's departure. Her concern for the poor, her newfound faith, and her friendship with the French layman Peter Maurin led to the founding of the Catholic Worker Movement. In short order, she opens up "houses of hospitality" for the poor, starts a series of communal farms, and begins her efforts on behalf of peace and nonviolence, which continue through the Vietnam era.

Most of this is detailed in her autobiography The Long Loneliness, first published in 1952. The journals, however, show a new side of Dorothy, as friends and admirers called her. For one thing, her struggles in the Catholic Worker Movement are reported much more openly. With the indigent and often mentally unstable people living in the Worker house in New York come frequent journal entries detailing outbursts, threats and violent behaviour. And, as in any human organisation, arguments among her co-workers threaten to sap her energy. "If you are discouraged," she writes in a poignant entry in 1935, "people would relapse into a state of discouragement and anger at circumstances and everybody else. And if you are not discouraged everyone tries to make you be and are angry because you are not." It's easy to imagine the founder of any religious order, or any great venture, having similar thoughts.

The diaries also trace her constant quest for sanctity, her frequent examinations of conscience and her almost total devotion to the Christian path. On scores of days she scolds herself for impatience or tart remarks. Yet these entries are not morbid, but hopeful: she sees herself en route to God, and is ever attentive to grace. As late as 1975, at age 78, she notes that she complains too much. "More silence in my life," she writes. "I must decrease, others increase ... Will I never learn?"

Until now, the standard portrait of Dorothy Day included her handing over her daughter to the care of others, while she attends to the Catholic Worker Movement. Those familiar with this picture will be astonished by how much time Dorothy spends with Tamar and her grandchildren. The book includes a litany of trips to her daughter's house in Vermont, where she delights in the family atmosphere. "We woke this morning and the roads were so icy that the schools were closed and all the children home," she writes in 1959. "Eric had a few good rides on his sled. Stanley and David are working on the wood ... Even little Hilaire, seventeen months old, tries to carry wood as they load it into the cellar." She could be any grandmother writing about her family.

A few months later, Dorothy received a message from Nanette, the companion of Dorothy's former partner, Forster. Suffering from cancer, Nanette asks if Dorothy would care for her. In response, with a gesture that she never wrote about publicly, Dorothy would care for Nanette in her last months and support the frequently distraught Forster. It was a heroic work of mercy. "It is inexpressibly painful to hear her despairing," she writes of Nanette. "And Forster keeps running away. He would like to go into a coma and escape it all."

Before dying Nanette asks to be baptised.

The diaries also show Dorothy doing what she is best remembered for: managing the Catholic Worker Movement, writing her monthly column "On Pilgrimage", protesting for peace, reading voraciously and speaking across the United States. She makes two trips to Rome during the Second Vatican Council; during one she sends a message to Pope John XXIII asking for a stronger condemnation of war. All along she strives to fulfil the "duty of delight", in a favourite phrase from John Ruskin. She dilates on the theme often. "I was thinking", she writes in 1961, "how as one gets older, we are tempted to sadness, knowing life as it is here on the earth, the suffering of the Cross. And how we must overcome it daily, growing in love, and the joy that goes with loving."

The book is unobtrusively edited by Robert Ellsberg, who as a young man worked with Dorothy, taking a five-year break from his undergraduate studies at Harvard. In addition to introductions for each decade, Ellsberg introduces new characters not only with thumbnail biographies in the footnotes, but also with carefully chosen descriptions by Dorothy from her other publications. And what characters! Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, Daniel Berrigan SJ, Pope Paul VI, Joan Baez, among them. As she ages her comments about them are truncated, which leads to a favourite entry from 1975 that reads in full: "Mother Teresa and Eileen [Egan] visited."

Today Dorothy Day, named a Servant of God by John Paul II in 2000, is on the road to canonisation. The Duty of Delight can take its place among the great autobiographies of the saints, not simply because of the writer's unwavering faith, but because of her unflinching honesty about her own life. Most saintly autobiographies, after all, were written with an eye to publication. St Augustine wrote for a wide audience, as did St Teresa of Avila. St Thérèse of Lisieux wrote for her convent, and Thomas Merton suspected that his journals would see the light of day. Dorothy did not. In 1958 she writes, "Since this is not for publication ..." before permitting herself a

complaint. Indeed, the last year of entries was discovered by Ellsberg only in 2006, as he was preparing this book: it was found in her bedside table, untouched.

Yet even in her private moments, as she struggles with her work, her family and her friends, she is joyful, finding God in every moment, praising the blessings of life. These

diaries are a reminder that holiness always makes its home in humanity, and they show how rewarding can be a life dedicated to the Gospels. The Duty of Delight enables the reader to feel closer to a remarkable woman, closer to the poor and, in the end, closer to God.

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