Paul Elie's book on 20th Century American Catholic writers weaves four lives together. One of them is Dorothy Day. One of the more sympathetic and thoughtful interpretations of what Day was about can be found in Volume 1 of James McClendon's Systematic Theology, subtitled Ethics.
Dorothy Day was about peacefully making trouble; and she was about guarding and protecting the vulnerable; and she was about building community using the flawed material of human lives often enough distorted through sin and suffering; and she was about hospitality as a habit of radical welcome in which each stranger is greeted as Christ.
Like many odd and hard to accommodate people, she was a Christian who inconveniently took Jesus seriously, and interpreted the Sermon on the Mount literally. As if Jesus could have actually meant, seriously intended, that his followers should love their enemies. As if turning the other cheek was any strategy for changing the world. As if forgiveness and peacemaking could be practiced with any hope of curbing brutality, converting hatred to love – as well expect people to beat their swords into ploughshares and so cultivate food instead of killing the enemy.
When Dorothy Day boarded the Greyhound bus to travel to Koinonia Farm run by Clarence Jordan, she did so for reasons of peacefully making trouble, and in doing so trying to convert trouble to peaceableness. The farm had been attacked by white supremacists and Ku Klux Klan members offended by the racial integration practiced on the farm – drive by shooting, arson, assault, vandalism, were commonplace. Dorothy Day took her place in the rota of those who stood guard overnight, in a truck parked under a light, and the truck was shot up by automatic weapon fire. She was unhurt. It seems a futile, reckless and provocative course of action, to put yourself in the line of fire. Flannery O'Connor made the astonishingly dismissive comment, "that's a mighty long way to come to get shot at, etc". There are those who would say that of Someone else – "that's a mighty long way to come to be crucified etc".
The picture of Dorothy Day shows the face of a troublesome peacemaker peacefully making trouble for the power holders, disturbing the peace of the status quo, a sharp fragment of gravel inside the boots of the troopers. The photo is a powerful Advent image. A poster sized copy is up on Stuart's study wall at the College – it is reproduced in Elie's book, and I think it is a stunning image of Christian resistance. Mess with the rest but don't mess with the best, huh?
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