Sunday Book Review, Belated: The Reckless Way of Love

I've had a review copy of this book, courtesy of the publisher, for much more time than it took to read. I put some time into the review, had it ready to post last Sunday...and then stayed home on Sunday with a wet, messy head cold. Plough deserved to have this review live three weeks ago. Here it is. 

Title: The Reckless Way of Love

Author: Dorothy Day

Editor: Carolyn Kurtz

Date: 2017

Publisher: Plough

ISBN: 978-0-87486-793-0

Length: 148 e-pages

Quote: “If you have two coats, you have stolen one from the poor.”

What you may not like about this book is that of course Dorothy Day didn’t write it. It’s a collection of snippets from the books she did write and from some private notebooks and letters, so the words are hers. The selection and arrangement of her words come from Carolyn Kurtz, who works for a publisher owned by the church associated with the Bruderhof.

You’ve probably seen “Bruderhof” as a name stamped on furniture. If you looked it up you know that it’s not a family name, but the company name of a small “brotherhood” of German immigrants. They make nice wooden furniture but I didn’t know that there are Bruderhof communities around the world, that they also own a publishing house and publish a’zine, or that they’re evangelical.

Dorothy Day was not a member of the Bruderhof. Nor was she a member of any Catholic order of nuns. She was born in New York in 1897, brought up Episcopalian. In youth she turned to socialism. She attended a journalism school, wrote for a while, was married, was divorced, then joined the Catholic church and devoted herself to urban mission work. Her missions were independent, funded neither by church nor state but by people who saw the good they were doing in their neighborhoods. She lived with depression, probably caused by lack of solitude, and wrote Catholic-masochistic warbles about altruism being a good thing. She probably helped poor people as much as she hurt them, in her lifetime, but she never managed to impoverish herself enough to be able to see from poor people’s perspective that they need a fair balance between giving and taking that reintegrates them into the same society to which the “helpers” belong. It remained for later generations to learn that her generation’s hopes of reconciling socialism with Christianity just didn’t work in the world where we live. Day died in 1980, while two major countries were still hopeful about the prospects of large-scale socialism.

In historical fact, though nation-sized efforts at enforced socialism or communism have failed, household or small neighborhood-sized versions of voluntary communism (or “communalism”) have worked for individuals who sincerely united in a common cause. Day’s New York communes were the model for Washington’s Community for Creative Non-Violence—often in the news for the difficulties that seem built into their cause and lifestyle, but remarkably able to solve their problems and survive for years. The price of their success is of course the difficulties that are built into their efforts. When everyone agrees to sell most of their belongings, pool enough of their resources to survive for a few years, and live in one big frugal household or even a neighborhood of frugal households, what they have may be an awesome social network, but it’s a network of poor people. Since their poverty is voluntary they may be considered to have climbed from a middle-class to an upper-class lifestyle; voluntary poverty is something aristocrats do. Nevertheless they’ve chosen to limit the resources they have for their work and, if they want to accomplish much, they soon find themselves spending much of their energy either on their own survival or on fundraising. If the former they may be happy in their vocations even as low-wage workers; if the latter they will inevitably be patronized, and almost certainly be forced to serve the purposes of, their wealthy sponsors. Communal living suits some people, especially the very young and the very old, who aren’t married and find it difficult or discouraging to face life alone. It can make room for the long process of social rehabilitation that lies ahead of recovering addicts. Because it suited some members of the early Christian church, many of whose members were thrown out of their homes and/or had lost their homes and joined for the free food, communal living worked for many of the great saints and still appeals to people who want to identify with the great saints.

On a large scale...though the apostolic church had communal groups sometimes in the thousands, it also had room for families like Peter’s and independent single adults like Paul. Communalism is sometimes perceived as the way primitive clans, tribes, or villages survived, but in practice, as successful primitive communities grew from villages into towns, they redefined boundaries between individual and family property and living space. At the same time, people have often reverted to the benefits of communal lifestyles for students, missionaries, and old people.

I’m not sure that Christians should have a formal process of canonizing saints. The word “saints” means people who have dedicated their lives to some form of religious practice. The early Christian church used it of people who were still active, apparently meaning something closer to what we mean by “fellow believers” or “church members.” Today the word is usually applied to departed Christians, and has been a source of schisms. Christians who believe that departed saints are “watching us from Heaven” now pray to the saints, or for them, that they will carry petitions to God; from this belief have grown many abuses. Christians who believe that departed saints are “at rest” don’t pray to them, but we try to carry on their work. Along with this dissent about how we relate to “the saints,” and the problem that a focus on departed saints can discourage living people from fulfilling their vocation to be saints, we also disagree about who our “saints” should be, whether we need to believe that they were perfect people—which of course they were not—or, if we accept their mortal imperfections, how we can regard people who made major mistakes as the “saints” who inspire our work. In some ways I see Dorothy Day as a bad example, but some people still see her as a “saint” and some Catholic Christians have petitioned to have her canonized.

And her most famous line has become so ridiculous. If you believe that having two coats is stealing one from the poor, you don’t have anything to put on if your one coat becomes unusable. Nor do you have much to give to the poor. You squander everything in the first year and after that you have nothing to give even to disaster victims. You become an example of Rush Limbaugh’s line, “The best thing you can do for the poor is not to be one of them.” You also set yourself up to pass unfavorable judgments on several of the great saints; Abraham, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Joseph of Arimathea, Candace of Ethiopia, and other people whose stories are in the Bible as good examples for us, were called by God to be rich. By trying to institutionalize and make permanent what the apostolic Christians did in response to the need of their time, you ultimately work toward the true purpose and function of large-scale socialism—keeping everyone permanently poor, oppressed, and afraid to complain.

If, on the other hand, you’re blessed with the chance to stockpile coats in a time when it’s hard to give away old coats, you may live to see a day when you or someone else will feel a need for your coats. Christians are not told not to save anything for the future. (In fact that’s precisely what the story of Joseph in the book of Genesis tells us to do.) We are told that the material things we may or may not accumulate are not meant to be the treasures of our hearts.

The United States had a real crisis of poverty in the 1930s. We call it our Great Depression. Even then we were blessed, because the Great Depression was not a true famine. Most people survived the Great Depression with nothing worse than an unchosen and often misguided change in their views of wealth. If they didn’t survive, it was due to either the contagious diseases that were still ravaging our land, or the wrong ideas that caused failed investors to commit suicide. Nevertheless, when Dorothy Day uttered her infamous line quoted above, many people did know someone who, through failure to have bought or made a second serviceable coat, really had worn out one coat while unable to afford another coat. Not in my lifetime but in my parents' lifetime, when you saw someone wearing less winter gear than you, the question was not whether the person had been exercising and shed some layers or had been caught unprepared as the weather turned cold, but whether the person owned the coat person wanted.

Dorothy Day should only have lived to see me struggling to sell some of the coats people have pressed upon me, now, because I’m hyperthyroid and rarely wear an overcoat. Some of them are good ones, too. In March a used-clothes seller, going out of business, gave a friend a whole gentleman’s wardrobe including a real camel-hair topcoat. The store had had a leak; some of the clothes had been rained on and become musty, so we took them to a laundromat in a poor neighborhood. While we watched the cotton shirts go around and around, two homeless men and two working-class families also used the laundromat. We tried to sell or even give away the things fresh out of the drying machines. We were able to get rid of a shirt and a jacket. We ended up leaving the camel-hair coat, and also a London Fog in good condition, in the drying machine where they’d been freshened up for five minutes with a scented “dryer sheet.” Nobody wanted them. It was not a cold wet night, and nobody wanted to bother with overcoats that would need dry cleaning. In today’s world, if you have two coats, or two dozen coats, you have failed to find people who were charitable enough to help you clean them out of your closet, freeing up space for the cotton shirts you actually wear.

Dorothy Day also uttered once-conceivably-relevant twaddle about carving up big houses to include rentable apartments, as if there were homes in the neighborhood of a university that hadn't been carved. It would at least have been healthier if she’d warbled about pulling down more apartment blocks to restore green space. And Dorothy Day also soaked up a lot of other bad ideas from the old socialists of her day, but enough is enough. Let us draw the curtain of charity over the errors of a good, misguided soul.

In The Reckless Way of Love,  as an introduction by another Bruderhoffer says, we don’t see any individual poor person whom Day helped; we learn nothing about the good or bad effect her handouts had on their lives. We don’t see Day carrying on like the good left-wing radical she always was, either, apart from a brief reference to time she spent in jail for a demonstration. Here are her most fundamentally “Christian” remarks, which the introduction describes as “more sustainable” than her more “radical” remarks. (The writer of the introduction was apparently unfamiliar with the idea of “radical Christianity,” a completely separate thing from any ideas described as radical politics. With all her faults Day was a radical Christian, one who seriously attempts to do what Jesus would have done, every day.) “If I could not understand scientific truths” like how a radio works, Day wrote, “why should I worry about understanding spiritual truths...?” So here we find none of the theological discourse for which her contemporary Dorothy Sayers was known, either. 

“We may be living on the verge  of eternity,” Day wrote in response to Cold War fears of the destruction of the Earth by nuclear war, “but that should not make us dismal. The early Christians rejoiced” in anticipation of God’s cleansing  reconstruction of the world. (The New Testament concludes with that joyous anticipation: “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”)

“Whatsoever thy hand finds to do,” she quoted Scripture, “do it with thy might.” Her “Catholic Worker” followers found cities in which to organize urban missions. The Bible writer (Solomon, possibly) was addressing audiences more likely to find farm chores, or manufacturing work in the days when things really were manufactured by hand. Christians inspired by mission work sometimes need to be reminded that making pottery, furniture, fabric, even “art,” are all blessed acts of Christian faith if we dedicate them to God—and sinful if we don’t.

“Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem” may have been a general description of her mission life. Day lived in a room of her own (she did recognize a need for boundaries) but spent her days at a mission where she saw “only too clearly how bad people are” and pushed herself to practice what she saw as love for them anyway.

She tried to avoid being doctrinaire or prescriptive. “I am terribly afraid of intruding” on other people’s spiritual lives, she wrote. “Does God have a set way of prayer...He expects each of us to follow? I doubt it.” Kneeling, she notes, came from medieval Europe; “Jews stood,” and Sayers herself often found holy solitude and communion with God while walking through the crowded streets of New York. Nevertheless some form of prayer “is as necessary to life as breathing.” She prayed that sponsors would support her mission, and they did. Once, she said, on the way back from prayer that God would cover her mission’s overdraft, someone she met on the street gave her a check for the precise amount the mission needed.

“To be simple as little children, to live in the presence of God, to love God in his creatures, to do away with all suspicion, anger, contention and lack of brotherly love, to do the little things each day as well as we can and to start in all over again each morning, refreshing ourselves, steeling our wills–this is all we need to keep in mind,” she said. Did she at least relish the irony that this is not a simple list?

An introvert, as most sincere religious people are, Day wrote, “It was...when I was alone and most happy” that she thought most about God. Was it hard to imagine or understand God? Did her early twentieth century contemporaries, especially her socialist friends, angrily reject the idea that God even exists? Then she could talk to them about love; they all seemed to agree that love exists. “All other loves...must be a sample of the love of God,” which “is more intense than any human love.”

“I wish I could just stay in my room and pray,” Day observed about her cluttered life. “Why do we expect happiness?...Never let our moods affect others. Hide any sadness.” For Day herself this was obviously a formula for increased depression. For most of us it’s a formula for a complete breakdown, more often physical than mental. Introverts live longer than extroverts do. The physical difference turns out to be, not that introverts are “weaker” in any way or even “stronger” in any obvious way, but that we develop more complete neurological systems. We perceive more of what is going on, including our physical need for solitude. It seems likely that the reason why extroverts die younger than we do is that they don’t know when they need solitude, nor how to relax and enjoy solitude. We do. Extroverts may experience a crowded life as self-indulgent but, even for them, it is self-destructive.

Day felt harassed by the people she allowed to get too close to her, too much of the time. “I seem angry when I am silent very often because of an expression of eye strain,” she wrote. She was perhaps lucky to live before writing became computerized. I used to be told that my dark heavy eyebrows looked “fierce” or forbidding, when I was looking down raptly at a page of something I was enjoying. Now people who need more work of their own to look at are likely to approach me in the public places where I work, whining “Are you having a good day?” because they see real tears of eyestrain on my face. People who believe they can “read faces” need to have pounded into them more ideas like “The body never lies, but the body of another person is not interested in you.”

The Catholic response, which Day makes here, is certainly susceptible to abuses. “When we suffer, we are told that we suffer with Christ,” she wrote. One corrective to this might be, “...and when we fail to do all that we might be able to do to prevent and relieve suffering, especially if we compound that sin by babbling blasphemy about their suffering being good in some ‘spiritual’ way, we sin and deserve damnation with His torturers.” Day fails to mention this; she parrots the standard phrases, “accept suffering with joy” and “do nothing but love, love, love.” These phrases have their places in the Christian life. Some suffering is inevitable and not subject to relief by fellow mortals. But it seems to me that even Catholics ought to start testing the sincerity of the self-proclaimed masochists they hear spouting this kind of verbiage. Do they “do nothing but love, love, love” when they take up a collection and nobody puts in anything but “love, love, love”?

Of course we might be asked to help people sort out their feelings. When we know the person and the situation this may be appropriate. During the war, Day recommended books—the Bible and Kristin Lavransdatter are still easy to find—and advised someone agitated by war news, “Turn off your radio. Put away your daily paper. Read one review of events a week and spend some time reading such books as the above.” I would guess that that was in a letter. In a book it would have been more appropriate to tell people things like “X now reads the news only one day a week,” or perhaps “By not watching television Y was able to live through the war with equanimity.”

Day’s Catholic Worker communes were urban missions. Did she really need to write about “farming communes,” in comments on a friend’s “vision”? Day had little practical experience of the sort of farming community that can form when Christians appreciate the gift of good land. She didn’t know how different a neighborhood of small farms where, as the Bible sets forth as our goal and reward, each one has one’s own vine and fig tree, can be from the ever-decreasing productivity of the Soviet experimenters’ “collective farms.” I might write a post or a book about that some day. I grew up in a community of small farms during years when people reclaimed land from harmful experiments with “modern methods” and had steadily increasing modest yields every year. I’ll only briefly mention, here, that though the Bible writers recognized people’s need to adapt to changing conditions and didn’t scold those who had little practical choice about being “huddled masses,” they ridiculed the building of “towers” and urged people to spread out, move away from cities, and cultivate each one’s own vine and fig tree. That much healthy interpersonal distance does not prevent their being a community.

I’ll just say that, though some of the things she believed were timeless truths and others were the falsehoods her century tested and disproved, here are the most overtly religious thoughts of a sincere Christian who was also a competent writer. If your Christian fellowship consists of writers whose books you read on your day of rest, Dorothy Day will probably be welcome.