I am proud to call Mia Nussbaum (though I call her Mary Margaret) a friend. We are not great friends, but she is a great woman. I have always admired her thirst for life, though I doubt I ever had the courage to tell her. She is, in my mind, the light of Christ. It's too bad, really, that I never really told her.
Read her account of Dorothy Day here . . .
In her canonization there is strange alchemy -- Christian anarchy gives way to Rome's bureaucracy, degradation to apotheosis. Devotees of her cause wonder if the sharp angles of her life will be dulled by a holy card's lines and if the prayerful act of tax refusal will be cloaked with the innocuous blanket of charity. But the dross of discord may become concordance. It was O'Connor who said that "her abortion should not preclude her cause, but intensifies it" and who preached that Day "saw people turned into tools of commerce . . . the family treated as a marketplace" and knew "that the Church herself could become . . . a marketplace."
G.K. Chesterton wrote that saints are an antidote to the age. Day was such a pinprick and balm. When blacks couldn't order coffee at Woolworth's, she chose a print of a black man and a white woman embraced by Christ for the paper's masthead. When every vacant lot was a Hooverville, Day chose to be poor, living with "rats . . . roaches, lice." When stable families moved to the suburbs, Day wrote that heaven was imagined as a city and savored the smell of bread baking in the ghetto's "ash heap."
While others become the monsters they fight, Day did not. As a pacifist she shunned peace activists' destruction of property. As a mendicant she did not become a materialist in reverse. She delighted in her senses, telling fellow bus travelers to eat "karopecan pie" in Arkansas and Oklahoma. She liked to listen to opera on the radio. As an old woman, she wrote, "Woke up this morning with these lines haunting me: 'Joyous, I lay waste the day.' 'Let all those that seek Thee be glad in Thee.'"
Catholic Workers gave at a personal sacrifice and welcomed strangers as angels unaware. Catherine Doherty, founder of the Friendship House movement, recalled visiting the Worker when there were no extra cots. Day told Doherty that she could sleep with her. Later that night a syphilitic woman came to the door. When Day told Doherty to sleep in the bathtub and took the sick woman into her own bed, Doherty worried that the syphilis would spread. Day replied, "You don't understand, this is Christ who has come to ask for a place to sleep. He will take care of me."
"Jesus Christ is the Fat Lady," J.D. Salinger wrote and Day repeated. She lived and breathed in the Mystical Body of Christ and so joins the company of those blazing, curious witnesses who are transparently good, a few of whom we know to call saints.
I have always loved saints' stories. Nearer than the dark luminescence of God, I see them in rich illustration. There is Francis, naked, in love and dancing, there he is in a cave with blood spilling from his hands, feet, side. There is Claire, chopping her hair; there is Lucy with her eyes plucked out, serving pastries.
At confirmation I sought out absurd saints -- Dymphna, Elmo, Roch -- being ironic, being cool. Initially I chose Pelagia of Antioch for her flare. Pelagia, an actress and courtesan, was known for the fineness of her pearls. One day she rode through Antioch on horseback, wearing only perfume and her pearls. She passed a synod of praying bishops. The men looked away in horror, save the bishop of Nonnus, who was so taken with her beauty that the next day he gave a homily that moved many to repentance and prayer, including Pelagia. Donning the rags of a monk, she climbed to the Mount of Olives. There she lived in a cave as a hermit and gave herself a man's name, Pelagius. Known as "the beardless monk," she lived in austerity and prayed for the life of the world. Only at her death in 311 did neighboring monks learn that Pelagius was a woman, and an old dancing girl.
Such stories of radical change are cliché for holy men -- the Augustinian trajectory of sinning one's way to salvation. The women that the church names as saints, however, are usually nuns and virgin martyrs. Flattened by the press of time they lose their hips and incisive minds. How good, then, to hear of Day, who "read desperately trying to rescue [herself] from the . . . silence," who stayed out all night drinking, who smoked, and lost her temper, who followed a lousy man halfway across the country.
How good for all of us -- such mercy -- how good for me. My faith was a long time coming, though it came from the start. I found God best dancing until until my bones seemed to slip, like buttons from their slots.
My friends and I are variously scarred and variously well. I think of the girls I know -- women now -- who are versed in roofies and rape whistles, Planned Parenthood payment options and morning-after drugs. I think of all of us, complicit in each other's failures, for we have failed each other, and of how right it would be to put on Christ, instead of our game faces.
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