Throwing the pebble in the pond

What we would like to do is change the world - make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute - the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words - we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbour, to love our enemy as our friend.

Dorothy Day

By Little and By Little

Being worthy

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbours worthy if anything can.

Thomas Merton

"Letter to Dorothy Day" in Catholic Voices in a World on Fire

God Himself come here to test us

Sometimes, as I sit and watch a child struggle to do just the right job of representing God's face, His features, the shape of His head, the cast of His countenance, I think back to my days of working in Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker soup kitchen. One afternoon, after several of us had struggled with a "wino," a "Bowery bum," an angry, cursing, truculent man of fifty or so, with long gray hair, a full, scraggly beard, a huge scar on his right cheek, a mouth with virtually no teeth, and bloodshot eyes, one of which had a horrible tic, she told us, "For all we know he might be God Himself come here to test us, so let us treat him as an honored guest and look at his face as if it is the most beautiful one we can imagine."

Robert ColesThe Spiritual Life of Children

Feeding our brother

We are our brother's keeper. Whatever we have beyond our own needs belongs to the poor. If we sow sparingly we will reap sparingly. And it is sad but true that we must give far more than bread, than shelter.... If we do give in this way, then the increase comes. There will be enough. Somehow we will survive; "The pot of meal shall not waste, nor the cruze of oil be diminished," for all our giving away the last bit of substance we have. At the same time we must often be settling down happily to the cornmeal cakes, the last bit of food in the house, before the miracle of the increase comes about. Any large family knows these things -- that somehow everything works out. It works out naturally and it works out religiously.
Dorothy DayLoaves and Fishes

No end of love

Whenever I groan within myself and think how hard it is to keep writing about love in these times of tension and strife which may, at any moment, become for us all a time of terror, I think to myself: "What else is the world interested in?" What else do we all want, each one of us, except to love and be loved, in our families, in our work, in all our relationships? God is love. Love casts out fear. Even the most ardent revolutionist, seeking to change the world, to overturn the tables of the money changers, is trying to make a world where it is easier for people to love, to stand in that relationship to each other. We want with all our hearts to love, to be loved.... When you love people, you see all the good in them, all the Christ in them. God sees Christ, his son, in us and loves us. And so we should see Christ in others, and nothing else, and love them. There can never be enough of it.

Dorothy Day On Pilgrimage

Imprisonment

I lost all feeling of my own identity.  I reflected on the desolation of poverty, of destitution, of sickness and sin.  That I would be free after thirty days meant nothing to me.  I would never be free again, never free when I knew that behind bars all over the world there were women and men, young girls and boys, suffering constraint, punishment, isolation and hardship for crimes of which all of us were guilty.  The mother who had murdered her child, the drug addict--who were the mad and who the sane?  Why were prostitutes prosecuted in some cases and in others respected and fawned on?  People sold themselves for jobs, for the pay check, and if they only received a high enough price, they were honored.  If their cheating, their theft, their lie, were of colossal proportions, if it were successful, they met with praise, not blame.  Why were some caught, not others?  Why were some termed criminals and others good businessmen?

Dorothy DayThe Long Loneliness

A new day

We are a restless and uncertain people.  Our lives may not be centered anymore on plantings and harvests, but they will always center around buried failures and fresh undertakings.  By celebrating and making conscious our endings, we take time out from our restless searching and allow ourselves hope for a new beginning.  New Year's Eve can be one of the great washdays of the year.  We can shed and give up the lost job, the old house, the missed opportunities, the tax forms, the political, economic, interpersonal regrets and anxieties, some good things, some bad things.  Then we can announce a new day, a new year, a new creation which we resolve to participate in and to help form.

Gertrud Mueller Nelson
To Dance with God

Worth

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbours worthy if anything can.

Thomas Merton
Letter to Dorothy Day, qtd. in Catholic Voices in a World on Fire

Dorothy Day

The sustained effort of writing, of putting pen to paper so many hours a day when there are human beings around who need me, when there is sickness, and hunger, and sorrow, is a harrowingly painful job. I feel that I have done nothing well. But I have done what I could.

Dorothy Day
The Long Loneliness

Good news to the poor

The gospels record that Jesus preached good news to the poor, and an essential part of that good news was that they were to be poor no longer.

- Dorothy Day, quoted in Dead Man Walking by Helen Prejean