A member of one of the country’s newest Catholic Worker communities reflects on the life and ongoing witness of Servant of God Dorothy Day.
In his work, The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky makes a simple point: The Gospel of Christ is so radically distinct from the logic of the world, that one who is animated by it will inevitably be taken for a fool — or at least a walking paradox, nonsensical according to the world’s accepted categories and terms of debate.
If this was the case in Dostoevsky’s late-19th-century Russia, awash as it was in the Orthodox faith, then it certainly holds true in our present-day post-Christian America.
While The Idiot gave us Prince Myshkin as an exemplar of this character type, a more contemporary and close-to-home illustration might be Dorothy Day — or at least that’s what was suggested by Tyler Hambley.
Hambley is a member of one of the country’s newest Catholic Worker communities, the movement co-founded by Day, whose cause for sainthood is currently under consideration. When asked what patronage Day might be assigned, Hambley didn’t point to one of the social causes the Servant of God is most often associated with — her pacificism, service to the poor, or political anarchism. Instead he pointed to the deeper disposition that underlay and informed all of Day’s various pursuits: her “holy foolery.”
Day’s “holy foolery” was highlighted by Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez in a recent speech that distinguished a Catholic response to social injustices from ascendent secular social movements. In Day, Archbishop Gomez says, Catholics have an important witness for how they “can work to change our social order through radical detachment and love for the poor grounded in the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, and works of mercy” — a corrective sign to both those who attempt to pursue authentic justice apart from God, but also those, including Catholics, who remain indifferent to the plight of the poor and the marginalized.
Day’s “holy foolery” has had a significant impact on Hambley, first through his encounter with the Catholic Worker community in Durham, North Carolina, while a divinity student at Duke University.
Today, Hambley lives at the Maurin House, a new Catholic Worker community just north of Minneapolis, with his wife and children, and the Millers, a family the Hambleys became friends with at Duke who have experienced a similar journey of conversion under Day’s inspiration. Animated by “a philosophy so old that it looks like new,” the Maurin House was established when the Hambleys and Millers bought houses with adjoining backyards, tore down the fence, and built a chapel for communal prayer. Today, they hold public prayers and meals twice a week, lead studies on Catholic social teaching, and have recently acquired and opened an adjoining “hospitality house,” where the homeless and poor are invited to live amongst and as a part of their community.
To better understand Day, her life, and her witness, the Register spoke with Hambley.
. . .
(Jonathan Liedl) Day seems to be one of those paradoxical figures, who includes dimensions within her that we don’t normally see together in one person — or that at least don’t fit into one of society’s prescribed “molds.” Why is that? What do you think are some of those alleged “paradoxes” and how is Day able to hold them together in a way society seems to say we can’t?
(Tyler Hambley) As a woman she was the informal leader of a radical movement in the Catholic Church. She was a Greenwich Village Bohemian who’d had an abortion and been arrested for social unrest prior to her conversion to a Church that is now in the process of canonizing her.
As a Catholic, she was a Christian pacifist, a Christian anarchist and a friend of the poor, but she was also a daily Massgoer (pre-Vatican II Latin Mass!), a devotee of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary and a fierce advocate of the silent spiritual retreats of Father John J. Hugo.
I think Day is often misapprehended as being some kind of “progressive” or “social justice” advocate. Her Catholicism is seen as accidental or secondary to her other commitments, even her “Christianity.”
The truth is, Day was so Catholic she didn’t let anything else around her determine the faith for her. Including her attendance at Mass, she prayed 3-4 hours a day and was convinced such devotion was inseparable from a Catholic Worker way of life.
. . .
(Jonathan Liedl) Thought experiment: Day is canonized and you’re advising the Pope on the matter. What do you recommend as her official patronage and why?
(Tyler Hambley) Hmm … maybe, Dorothy Day, patron saint of holy foolery?
Dorothy Day: Patron Saint of …. Holy Foolery?
Holy Foolery!