Gratitude 

Gratitude brought Dorothy Day to God. In 1925, Day was living in a bungalow on the beach in Staten Island. She had spent the past ten years working in Manhattan as a journalist documenting the radical political movements she supported, and living a bohemian lifestyle with artists, playwrights, and activists in Greenwich Village. An abusive relationship led to an abortion and abandonment, and she left the city exhausted and heartbroken. It was in that home on Staten Island that Day began to experience healing. She had fallen in love with a man named Forster who shared with her his passion for the natural world. In her spiritual autobiography, she writes: “He used to insist on walks no matter how cold or rainy the day, and this dragging me away from my books, from my lethargy, into the open, into the country, made me begin to breathe. If breath is life, then I was beginning to be full of it because of him. I was filling my lungs with it, walking on the beach, resting on the pier beside him while he fished, rowing with him in the calm bay, walking through fields and woods – a new experience entirely for me, one which brought me to life, and filled me with joy.” Though Forster was an atheist, hostile to all forms of religion, Day wrote that “his ardent love of creation brought me to the Creator of all things.” She often would ask him, “How can there be no God, when there are all these beautiful things?” And she found herself beginning to pray. At first, this unsettled her, for she had previously embraced the Marxist claim that, “religion is the opiate of the masses.” But then she realized her prayer wasn’t motivated by unhappiness or the desire to “get something” from God. “I was praying because I wanted to thank Him,” especially when she discovered she was pregnant, something she thought would be impossible after the abortion. This gift of new life filled her with the desire for a relationship with the Transcendent God. “It was all very well to love God in His works, in the beauty of His creation which was crowned for me by the birth of my child. Forster had made the physical world come alive for me and had awakened in my heart a flood of gratitude. The final object of this love and gratitude was God. No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore.” She was determined to become Catholic, the Church having “come down through the centuries since the time of Peter, [and which] claimed and held the allegiance of the masses of people in all the cities where I had lived.” Her becoming Catholic led to the painful end of her relationship with Forster, however, who refused to marry her. She remained a devout Catholic her whole life, co-founding the Catholic Worker movement, through which she sought to help her fellow Catholics, laity and clergy alike, to be faithful to the teachings of Christ and His Church. 

This weekend, as we conclude our celebrations of the great civic holiday of Thanksgiving, may the gratitude we express for the good things we have received move our hearts to seek the Transcendent God, our Creator and Redeemer, just as it did for Servant of God Dorothy Day. 

posted 11/30/24