Tag: religion

From an early age, I was drawn to voices that challenged the world’s cruelty with conscience and compassion. I read books by and about Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Merton, Elie Wiesel, and John Howard Griffin, among others. Each offering a view into suffering, resistance, and the sacred duty to bear witness. But among them all, it was Dorothy Day who walked beside me the longest and still does. Her words didn’t just echo in my mind; they shaped the very path beneath my feet.

Dorothy Day, born on this day in 1897 in Brooklyn, New York, was not merely a writer or an activist. She was a radical in the truest sense: one who went to the root. She co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement during the Great Depression, not as a charity, but as a revolution of mercy. Houses of hospitality. Loaves of bread. A newspaper that cost a penny, “The Catholic Worker”, and told the truth. She believed in voluntary poverty, in the dignity of every person, and in the fierce, inconvenient demands of love.

It was her vision that led to the creation of communities like the Community for Creative Nonviolence (CCNV) and Jonah House, which I was a part of. These were not places of comfort, but places of confrontation with injustice. With indifference. With the part of ourselves that wants to look away. And yet, they were also places of deep, stubborn hope, the kind Dorothy carried like a candle into the darkest corners of the world.

Even now, as I live and write from Rambling Harbor, her teachings guide me. In every act of remembrance, in every refusal to be silent, in every meal shared or injustice named, I feel her presence. Not as a saint on a pedestal, but as a companion in the struggle. A woman who once said, “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.”

Dorothy Day taught us that the works of mercy are not optional. That feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and comforting the afflicted are not acts of charity, but of justice. She reminded us that the personal is political, and the political must be individual. That love, real love, is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.

So today, on her birthday, I light a candle not just for her memory, but for the movement she sparked, a movement that still burns in kitchens and shelters, in protests and poems, in every quiet act of resistance that says: We will not abandon each other.

Dorothy Day walked the hard road. I’ve tried, in my own stumbling way, to follow.