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There are not many people this side of heaven who I love more than Dorothy Day, Catholic radical and creator of the Catholic Worker Movement. There was this ruggedness about her, a hardness brought about by a life of love found and love lost, of faith found and faith tried. Most of the time, she could be found with a cigarette in one hand, a coffee cup in the other, and a listening ear to whomever she was ministering to.
Life was hard for the Catholic Worker crew on Mott Street in New York City in the 60s and 70s. There were people who needed food, and people who needed shelter. There were people who needed money and people who needed jobs. But most of all, and the thing that Dorothy found most true, was that people also needed love –someone to sit down with them, share coffee with them and love them for who they were. Life was hard.
There’s a snippet of Dorothy’s diary that touches on how difficult their lives were at the time. It wasn’t really a lament, just a fact of life – that it is hard and it is overwhelming sometimes. At the end of the entry, Dorothy wrote, “But no one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There’s too much work to do.”
Life is hard. For me and for you. In the difficulties that life inevitably brings about, we often feel paralyzed – unable to move or work because the stresses and anxieties become too much to bear. In such moments, it is good that we are together. Because it is our shared life that reminds us that we’re not alone, and never were. You and me and everybody else – we stand as reminders to one another that while there may be a lot of work to do, we can do it together.
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