Peace
and Advocacy for the Poor
Monday, July 13, 2020
Dorothy Day (1897-1980) gives us a clear example of a contemplative activist. In her case, she began with activism, converted to Catholicism around age 30, and eventually lived out her two callings in a powerful and effective way. My friend John Dear, himself a contemplative activist, writes this about Dorothy Day:
An activist and journalist living in New York City’s Greenwich Village, [Dorothy Day] fought for labor rights, women’s rights, and an end to World War I. In 1927, after her daughter Tamar was born, she was filled with gratitude and received the gift of faith. She decided that the two of them should be baptized in the [Catholic] Church. In response, her partner promptly left her.
It was 1932, and Dorothy didn’t know what to do or how to be a radical Catholic Christian. While attending a march against hunger in Washington, D.C., she prayed that God would open up a way for her to practice her radical politics as a devout Catholic. Her prayer was answered in the person of Peter Maurin, a French peasant intellectual who was waiting for her back in New York. Within a few months, they founded the Catholic Worker Movement [on May 1, 1933]. [1]
The Catholic Worker Movement is alive and well today, with over 200 active communities. Catholic Workers commit to voluntary poverty, prayer, nonviolence, and hospitality to those in need. They also protest and take action against systems of injustice, war, racism, and all forms of violence. [2] Robert Ellsberg, who worked with Dorothy Day in New York, continues:
[Dorothy Day’s] spirituality and her social witness were equally rooted in the radical implications of the Incarnation. In Christ God assumed our humanity. And we could not worship God without honoring God’s image in our fellow human beings. We should feed them when they were hungry; shelter them when they were homeless. We should not torture them; we should not kill them.
In the 1950s Day and the Catholic Worker took on a more activist profile. She was repeatedly jailed for refusing to take shelter during compulsory civil defense drills in New York City. In the 1960s her activities reflected the turbulence of the times—protesting the Vietnam War, fasting in Rome during the Second Vatican Council to advance the cause of peace. She was last arrested while picketing with the United Farm Workers in 1973 at the age of seventy-five. By this time she was widely honored as the radical conscience of the American Catholic church. But her life was not primarily occupied by activism or protest. She was a woman of prayer, beginning each day with meditation on scripture, attending daily Mass, and reciting the breviary [daily psalms, scripture readings, and prayers]. By and large, her life was spent in very ordinary ways, her sanctity expressed not just in heroic deeds but in the mundane duties of everyday life. Her “spirituality” was rooted in a constant effort to be more charitable toward those closest at hand
Who am I when there is no more rushing around? Troubling emotions arise to the surface even in my dreams. In contemplation I find a spacious place where I can bring the messiness of my inner world to a peaceful center. From there flows service to those in my immediate circles, particularly my elderly parents. In little things I take delight: conversations over coffee with my wife, a morning jog, the sighting of a goldfinch. —Tom A.
Contemplation: A Life’s Journey
Sunday, July 12, 2020
I believe that the combination of human action from a contemplative center is the greatest art form, one that takes our whole lives to master. When action and contemplation are united, we have beauty, symmetry, and transformation—lives and actions that heal the world by their very presence. Jesus is the perfect example of this, but we can also point to the lives of many saints, mystics, teachers, and even people we know who share this gift.
For most people, the process begins on the side of action. We learn, we experiment, we do, we stumble, we fall, we break, and we find. Gradually, our thoughts and actions become more mature, but it is only when we begin to question our own viewing “platform” that we begin to move into the realm of contemplation. The contemplative side of the soul will reveal itself when we begin to ask, “How can I listen for God and learn God’s voice? How can I use my words and actions to expand and not to contract? How can I keep my heart, mind, and soul open, even ‘in hell’?”
Contemplation is a way to bring heaven to earth, but it begins with a series of losses, largely of our illusions. If we do not enter the learning process deeply, with curiosity and openness, we will use our words and actions to defend ourselves. We will seek to protect ourselves from our shadow, and build a leaden cover over our soul and our unconscious. We will settle for being right instead of being whole and holy, for saying prayers instead of being prayer.
True contemplation is really quite down to earth and practical. It does not require life in a monastery. It is, however, an utterly different way of receiving the moment, and therefore all of life. In order to have the capacity to move the world, we need some “social distancing” and detachment from the diversions and delusions of mass culture and our false self. Contemplation builds on the hard bottom of reality—as it is—without ideology, denial, the contemporary mood, or fantasy.
The reason why the true contemplative-in-action is still somewhat rare is that most of us are experts in dualistic thinking. And then we try to use this limited thinking tool for prayer, problems, and relationships. It cannot get us very far. We cannot grow in the great art form of action and contemplation without a strong tolerance for ambiguity, an ability to allow, forgive, and contain a certain degree of anxiety, and a willingness to not know—and not even need to know. This is how we allow and encounter Mystery.
This week the Daily Meditations feature contemplative activists who encountered Mystery and felt called to live out Jesus’s prayer that God’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). Their lives embody the beautiful struggle that is revealed when we seek to hold heaven and earth together through our love and faithfulness to God, humanity, and creation.
What word or phrase resonates with or challenges me? What sensations do I notice in my body? What is mine to do?
Prayer for Our Community:
O Great Love, thank you for
living and loving in us and through us. May all that we do flow from our deep
connection with you and all beings. Help us become a community that vulnerably
shares each other’s burdens and the weight of glory. Listen to our hearts’
longings for the healing of our world. [Please add your own intentions.] . . .
Knowing you are hearing us better than we are speaking, we offer these prayers
in all the holy names of God, amen.
Listen to Fr. Richard read the prayer.
Story from Our
Community:
Who am I when there is no more
rushing around? Troubling emotions arise to the surface even in my dreams. In
contemplation I find a spacious place where I can bring the messiness of my
inner world to a peaceful center. From there flows service to those in my
immediate circles, particularly my elderly parents. In little things I take
delight: conversations over coffee with my wife, a morning jog, the sighting of
a goldfinch. —Tom A.
Click Image for John White's Original Vision For CO2's
