DOROTHY DAY THROWS DOWN THE GAUNTLET

 “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.” by  DOROTHY  DAY

I was stopped in my tracks when I read this sentence attributed to Dorothy Day, the woman who started the Catholic Worker Movement.  I had  known of her since childhood because my mother subscribed to the Catholic Worker Newspaper and she often read aloud  or  brought articles about workers' struggles to my attention.  My mother  was forced to leave school after the 8th Grade and to begin sweeping out  a mill to help support the family.  She was the smartest  graduate of Saint Patrick's Grammar School and won many awards.  
She was an avid reader and  she  seemed to find  the important writers. She read and was  amazed by Thomas Merton;s Seven Story Mountain and  read some sections aloud to me.

I have often spoken about her poetry but she was a constant library  person and took me  weekly downtown  to two libraries The Pawtucket Public Library and  Saint Augustine's Book Store and Lending Library.  In these  days of going through the collections here in her house I have  found her well worn and underlined  copy of THE IMITATION OF CHRIST,

So what am I to make of that sentence from Dorothy Day?? Who is the person that I love the least and how is that a limit or a gauge of my love of God? We say that God still loves us no matter what we do.  But we do not extend the same unwavering love to people who wrong or harm us. Where did I draw the line?  
Over the years I have  become aware in  work  environments of colleagues who were undermining me or gossiping against me and I  disliked them.
It was when I  began using Buddhist exercises under the influence of Pema Chodron,an American Buddhist nun, that I practiced her exercise of gradually beginning with the people closest to us and wishing them all  the best things in  their lives.  And then she asks us to extend that well-wishing to  more and more distant circles of our acquaintances.  AND although I might have hesitated as the circles  began to include people who have tried to harm me I  did not have the desire to harm them and  I was able to extend my good wishes to them. 

 I am grateful that I do not experience  desire for revenge.  I have only felt that burning rage to  get back at someone  in my childhood when I witnessed my sisters being mistreated and ridiculed. I was their champion and they knew that and ran to me if they understood that they were being abused. Oftentimes they did not.
I often plotted and sometimes exacted revenge  in those days of my childhood in Pawtucket.
But unlike the pear stealing,   I saved those tales for the confessional.