#34: On Dorothy Day and Direct Action

January 31, 2022

I spent a good chunk of winter break reading first a biography and then the autobiography of Dorothy Day, the Catholic writer and activist, founder of the Catholic Worker movement. Dorothy Day was not born into a Catholic family, but converted shortly after the birth of her daughter, Tamar. Her life pre-conversion was fascinating--she was a bohemian writer for a socialist newspaper, drinking and smoking with playwright Eugene O'Neil and the writer Mike Gold all over Greenwich Village, had a disastrous affair and an abortion, she got quickly married and quickly divorced, and then lived with Tamar's father, Forster Batterham, in a fisherman's shack on Long Island. She wrote this lovely little essay on having her baby. Her increasing religiosity caused their separation, something which she mourned, but felt was ultimately inevitable.

After their separation, Dorothy bounced around for a few years--California, Mexico, New York, Long Island again--before she met Peter Marin, a French philosopher/theologian/mystic, who basically hung out in Union Square asking after Dorothy Day and in such a manner found her apartment and showed up one morning to, basically, tell her to start the Catholic Worker. And so she did. Dorothy Day, with a few funds from a sympathetic priest, started both a regular newspaper, published seven times a year, and, more radically, a Hospitality House.

After I had read both these books on Day, I got this fantastic newsletter from Tony Ginocchio (whose publication is delightfully called Grifts of the Holy Spirit, or G.O.T.H.S.). The whole thing is worth reading, but for now, I'll turn your attention to this section on the Catholic Worker Hospitality houses and what made them radical:

"And once again, guess what: a lot of places will kick you out if you say something racist, hit another person, or almost burn the place down. I'd even go so far as to say that most places will do this, and that they probably should. It's kind of how society has to function in most places. What's radical is that Dorothy Day built a place that didn't function like the rest of society. She was an imperfect person, like all of us, but she was capable of love that could build the Kingdom of God, build a home for wretched people who had been kicked out of everywhere else and finally found the one place where they can't kick you out."

Catholic Worker hospitality houses were open to everyone, particularly the poor or those who desired to live and work alongside them. To live in a hospitality house you did not need to work, or have a job, or contribute to the running of the house, you just needed to show up and need a place to stay. Day was the editor of the Catholic Worker more or less until her death in 1980, running the paper for very nearly 50 years, and the Catholic Worker house she founded in New York continues to thrive, along with Worker Houses across the country and world that share a similar ethos.

I think if I had to summarize what the Catholic Worker movement was about it is direct action--when you see a problem, you step in to fix it. The resources, the energy, the money the time--you figure all that out along the way, you write in your $0.01/issue periodical, exhorting people to send more money, W.H. Auden goes on a local TV quiz show and donates the proceedings to your cause, but in the meantime, you're there, face to face with need, and working to meet it.

I'm currently working on the part of my book that's about my time with New Sanctuary Coalition, also in New York. Once a week, I'd drop into the basement of Judson Memorial Church, or into the lounge of the NYU law school, and I'd sit and talk to people--people that really genuinely needed help--and work through an asylum application or another set of bureaucratic or legal paperwork that would ultimately make a huge difference in their lives. Sara, one of the coordinators for the clinic, would open clinic by telling the volunteers that we were engaged in important, grassroots resistance to the immigration system, by providing help where the system counted on there being none, making the system do what it was meant to do and actually consider the properly filled out applications of asylum seekers. There was no bureaucracy but what the government gave us to deal with, no barriers to entry, no costs or fees or ways you could get kicked out. It had its challenges, as much in dealing with other volunteers (stubborn, patronizing, bossy) as in dealing with the people there to get help--kids running through the room or tugging on their parents while we were trying to talk to them, people too distracted or anxious to attend to the help we were able to offer, people who were cranky or snappish or rude, like people can be. There were also the more quotidian sacrifices--those of time, of my energy, of the way that this kind of work tends to leak out into all corners of your life whether you want it to or not. Even so, I loved doing this work, and I only stopped when I moved out of New York for graduate school.

Since then, as many of you know, I still currently work in immigration, although very differently. I wrote a little bit about that experience in an earlier letter--its important, and I know it is, but as I'm doing it it is very, very rare that I get to feel like I'm solving any problems, that I am encountering someone's need and meeting it. This is to say: it is very rare to find a space, to find a setting that allows you to encounter your community in this way, it's hard to create a setting in which this happens. It's also hard to maintain it--reading The Long Lonelinessis one long reason for why the Catholic Worker houses are truly miraculous spaces, little pockets of the Kingdom of God. Things are constantly going wrong, people are constantly making the houses difficult places to exist, ideological disagreements drive wedges between volunteers, there is never enough money or time.

This miracle that is direct action feels particularly true of a system like immigration, where there are only very certain specific points or ways where you can do something. Last week, as the last two counties in Illinois are wrapping up their ICE detention programs, a coalition of organizations, including NIJC, did a car rally, with a procession of honking cars and speeches both present and livestreamed. During breaks in the honking, you could hear people inside the prison beating on the windows, acknowledging the rally and their place inside the jail. The caravan was important--it raised awareness of the issue, it made people inside feel seen and heard as they've been on lockdown for weeks due to the Omicron surge, it got vital press during an important set of weeks for the #FreeThemAll movement--but it wasn't the kind of direct action I'm sure every activist dreams of: breaking down the doors and letting people stream out into the winter sunshine.

As I'm working on this section of the book, I want to keep that feeling front and center--of how miraculous, and how rare it feels to be able to step in and intervene directly, how rarely we are afforded those opportunities. Beyond the book though, I want to work on making spaces in my own life where this becomes possible. To help directly in this way means getting involved, day-to-day, in your community--it means being like the owner of Takorea Cocina in my neighborhood who will buy out the local tamale vendors and distribute the tamales to the houseless or donate hot meals to striking teachers (also, his bulgogi nachos ABSOLUTELY slap). It means being like those who run The Living Pantry out of a gallery in Brooklyn, posting infinite IG stories asking for people to buy diapers and food for their community members. It means stopping to chat with houseless neighbors, carrying cash in your wallet, joining mutual aid, getting actually invested in the places you live and work and walk through every day.