It’s always amazed me how the thing I need to hear often shows up exactly when I need to hear it. As usual, I was late to get around to reading an article (clearly I missed it the first time, it’s from 2023!) but Zina Hitz’s piece “Other Monks” in Plough found its way onto my reading list recently, and it was provoking–in a very good way.

Hitz lived for a time at Madonna House, a Catholic community founded by Catherine Doherty where laity and priests live together in community and simplicity, serving the poor. Her description of her experiences felt perfectly true to my own brief experience with community life (though to be fair, I chose my companions):

I learned to see that life with unchosen strangers laid bare one’s own faults so that one lives with a painful self-consciousness, regularly realized if not constant.

The sort of non-homogeneous community Hitz found at Madonna House is what we hope to move toward with our own Catholic Worker group – but for the most part I think we still fall into the same category with which Hitz labels her own friends of choice: “all bookish, and all middle class.” There is room for improvement in my own life if I want to love as Christ loved, leaving no one out. But that was not the insight that made me pause and blush with recognition, this was:

Among the forms of human speech sacrificed in common life are gossip, trivial comments about the lives of others: complaints, hasty judgments, salacious stories, speculations, cruel entertainments, and gratuitous criticism.

My first thought was, “If I said none of those things, my house would be very quiet…”

But how to break out of these habits of speech? This is not the main question of Hitz’s article, but it was the question the article raised for me. I could start any number of places – the way I correct my children, the stories I share with my husband, my reaction to the news, or traffic, or broken household appliances (I’m looking at you, mircowave)…and yet even as I consider how to stop complaining a little joke-complaint slips in. It looks to be an uphill battle.

***

A little later in the article Hitz continues:

[My friend groups] were, perhaps, intelligent, wise, authentic, morally upright, or edgy. Perhaps we drank fresh-brewed coffee rather than instant, read books rather than watched movies, or had in other respects excellent taste in consumer products. Nonetheless, such garden-variety exclusion is the antithesis of unconditional love.(emphasis added)

She held up a mirror, and what I saw was not pretty. I probably say something along these lines several times a day, I laugh about it, I have (mostly unintentionally) taught my kids to think like this. But I think Hitz is right: when we judge first, there is no opportunity for love to take root.

I don’t have a solution, or even a plan of action to work on this. Yet here, perhaps, is a place to start: with humility. However good I may consider my coffee or book choices to be, I am well aware that there are many things I just don’t know or understand. Could a stance of humility and curiosity – and, for me personally, a willingness to ask questions rather than play the part of quiet know-it-all – be a first step? My kids are very good at this; maybe I need to take some lessons from them.

I know what I don’t want: my hasty judgements, uncharitable speech, and “garden-variety exclusion” to prevent me from forming interesting, loving friendships with people whom my very limited imagination doesn’t recognize as good candidates for part of my community.

***

I just finished reading The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day (how’s that for some alliteration). Over and over again Day prays that she will learn to control her tongue – to speak less, less hastily, and less critically. At the beginning of 1960 she writes:

This year I must strive for gentleness and listening–less talking, no passing judgements, no impatience. God help me.

And all I can say to that is, “Me too. Amen.”

I came across this passage in one of Dorothy Day’s monthly columns for the Catholic Worker paper the other day, written when she was staying with her daughter before the birth of her third grandchild:

“It has been a month of ‘ice, rains, snow and stormy winds,’ and every morning after the routine of fires, breakfasts and dressing has taken place, Becky, Susie and I rock in the wicker chair and sing, ‘All ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; oh ye ice and snow, oh ye cold and wind, oh ye winter and summer, oh ye trees in the woods, oh ye fire in the stove, oh ye Becky and Susie, bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him forever.’ It is a song with infinite variations. You can include Mr. Clark’s cows, Leslie’s horses, the Hennessy goats, and all the human beings for miles around…What are we here for anyway except to praise Him, to adore Him and to thank Him? … and there is plenty to remind us of that in the country.”

-Dorothy Day, On Pilgrimage (in the CW paper – not the book) March 1948

We have our own verses to add lately. (Because of course you don’t have to be in the country to come up with more.)

Swallowtails and zinnias, bless the Lord.

Sprouts and seedlings, bless the Lord.

And as Hurricane Ida gets here, it will be winds and rains, bless the Lord. Fortissimo.

It’s a good reminder: we aren’t on Earth just to work and to suffer, we are here to praise God. Last week our praise (besides morning prayer) included our school work and dance and play-doh and some spent-grain bread; next week I expect it will include fallen-limb removal.

The pre-hurricane preparations are finished, except for the boards for the picture window, which we’ll do tonight. And then comes the waiting. And we get to be reminded just how small and not in control we are.

I heard a homily recently centered around the idea of the “next right thing,” or “one small change.” When I got home and turned to the reflection book I’ve been praying with at night, I found this:

“The solution proposed in the Gospels is that of voluntary poverty and the works of mercy. It is the little way. It is within the power of all. Everybody can begin here and now…. We have the greatest weapons in the world, greater than any hydrogen or atom bomb, and they are the weapons of poverty and prayer, fasting and alms, the reckless spending of ourselves in God’s service and for his poor. Without poverty we will not have learned love, and love, at the end, is the measure by which we shall be judged.”

Dorothy Day, quoted in The Reckless Way of Love

Ouch. As usual, Dorothy Day shows me just how much growing I still have to do. Poverty? Our fridge is always full, and we just bought a new couch. I consistently fail at fasting. We’re so-so at alms. Prayer? I can say that I make an effort, but not that it’s always a whole-hearted one.

And after a few days re-reading Dorothy Day’s diaries (in the name of research) all these points have been driven home even further: she complains of so many people who wish “to do big things but not little ones.” ^[1]Jan. 25, 1946

Which brings me back to the “one small change” idea. Dorothy’s diaries show her repeatedly planning small sacrifices she could make: fasting from meat,^[2]June 18, 1950 practicing “joyful silence,”^[3]Feb 1944 not complaining about the radio.^[4]Feb. 24, 1953

I started small, too. First, I signed up to bring a meal to a friend who had a baby. And as for fasting, maybe I can start skipping my post-putting-Jacob-to-nap snack. Small things.

My week’s reading/research has also reminded me of the impact of doing the small things. As they were moving out of the Mott Street Catholic Worker house, Dorothy added up how many meals they had served to the hungry and homeless during the 14 years they had lived there. She came up with 2,555,000. Conservatively. ^[5]Nov. 27, 1950

Every day they cooked what they had, opened the doors, and fed people. Many days they felt like failures – the need was just too great. Yet over time their work added up to more than they could have hoped for.

What does the sacrifice of my one snack, day after day, week after week, add up to? Fortunately, that’s not the part I have to worry about. The math is up to God. He feeds the 5,000 with a few loaves and fishes. He makes our poverty and prayer, fasting and alms, however small, more efficacious than any work we might do on our own.

Dorothy again:

“Do what comes to hand. Whatsoever thy hand finds to do, do it with all thy might. After all, God is with us. It shows too much conceit to trust to ourselves, to be discouraged at what we ourselves can accomplish. It is lacking in faith in God to be discouraged. After all, we are going to proceed with his help. We offer him what we are going to do. If he wishes it to prosper, it will.”

Dorothy Day, House of Hospitality

“If he wishes it to prosper, it will.” One afternoon-snack-sized sacrifice at a time.

We did a silly thing. We went to a violin rehearsal, despite the flash flood warnings, with the thought that if the weather was really that bad, surely it would have been canceled.

Trying to get home, and circling helplessly with all the other soggy cars on the south-west side of Lafayette, I was at a bit of a loss. Kaliste Saloom Road was flooded. Ambassador Caffery was flooded. Broadmoor was flooded. I didn’t dare try Verot School Road. For all the hurricanes and flash floods we’ve lived through down here, I’ve never actually been in a situation where I couldn’t get home because of the water on the road, and it was nearing 8pm, so I wasn’t sure what we should do.

Fortunately, a good friend of ours lives very close to where we were stuck. The kind of friend one can call at eight o’clock at night and ask to drop in. I called her, and we spent an hour and a half on her couch, waiting for the water to go down and drinking lavender chamomile tea.

When it seemed reasonable to try again, we set out, with the assurance that we could come back and sleep on the couches if we still couldn’t get through.

Needless to say, I prayed all the way home.

And we made it – the road already looked like we had just had any normal rain shower, not a near crisis.

So it was late when I went to bed, but I had been slack about my prayer time during the last few days, so I picked up the little devotional I’ve been using (The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus, which is a collection of excerpts from Dorothy Day’s writings) and this was the reading up next:

Pouring rain today. I stayed in, resting – feeling exhausted. Sorrow, grief, exhaust one. Then tonight the prayers, the rosaries I’ve been saying were answered. And the feeling that prayers are indeed answered when we cry out for help was a comfort in itself. I had the assurance that they were answered, though it might not be now.

Dorothy Day, from The Duty of Delight, quoted in The Reckless Way of Love

Well. First of all, “stayed in, resting” sounded like what we should have done.

But we didn’t, and during the course of the evening I’d been getting these little nudges – “only do the necessary shopping so you can be back sooner.” Lucy finished early, and would have waited a half hour in the rain for me if I had done my usual Monday night rounds. “Turn around…” repeatedly. “Just call Danielle, already!”

When I read the next half of the devotional entry, I had no doubt that my guardian angel had been working overtime:

I would not perhaps see the results. “Praised be God, the God of consolation. He comforts us in all our afflictions and enables us to comfort those who are in trouble, with the same consolation we have had from him” (2 Cor. 1:3-4). Suffering draws us to prayer and we are comforted. Or at least strengthened to continue in faith, and hope, and love.

Dorothy Day, from The Duty of Delight, quoted in The Reckless Way of Love

Our friends were the consolation we needed – literally safe harbor in a storm. What could have been an evening sitting in our car in the Books-A-Million parking lot waiting for the rain to stop ended up instead being an evening of comfort and conversation. My panic was soothed: we had a place to sleep if needed. My friends’ superior knowledge of the roads in the area strengthened me to continue.

God knows that, despite his long history of faithfulness to me, sometimes I need a reminder that he will provide for me. This week, it came in the form of good friends and chamomile tea.