Loaves and Fishes - Dorothy Day

So says Dorothy Day in "Loaves and Fishes" (p. 177), and it is both the heart of the book's message and the central theme of her adult life. Thank goodness Orbis has reprinted this classic personal history of the Catholic Worker movement and the colorful saints in its ranks. In the book, Dorothy tells how her depression-era meeting with Peter Maurin birthed first a newspaper, then a hospitality house, then a national movement. In addition, Dorothy tries to explain the underlying theological and spiritual principles of the Catholic Workers: the resistance to power structures that cynically refuse to care for society's most vulnerable; the Christ-inspired conviction that voluntary poverty (or what Dorothy called "precarity") is a mechanism for social reform as well as a transformative sharing in redemptive suffering; that the duty of Christians is to collaborate with God in the creation of God's Kingdom; and that in society as it's currently structured, one is either on the side of the poor or one is an exploiter--there's no fence-sitting. As Peter Maurin says (quoted by Dorothy, p. 86): "We cannot see our brother [or sister] in need without stripping ourselves. It is the only [genuine] way we have of showing our love."

Reading Dorothy Day, as I try to do every year, is a reminder both of how far from the Gospel message most of us who call ourselves Christians live, and how wonderfully easy, joyful, and liberating living that message would actually be. By both her example and writings, Dorothy invites us to ask ourselves why we hold back from doing what we know is right, and inspires us to roll up our sleeves and accept the Gospel challenge. Let her have the final word here (p. 176):

"One of the greatest evils of the day...is [a] sense of futility. People say, What good can one person do? What is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment. But we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transorm all our individual actions, and know that God will take them and multiply them, as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes."