DOROTHY DAY LOOKING FOR LOVE IN ALL THE RIGHT PLACES--YES

Some thoughts on the QUESTION 
WHAT IS LOVE -- FOR DAYS AFTER VALENTINE'S DAY

I have been thinking about Saints or those considered for canonization who passed through Rhode Island.  So far I have come up with a short list that includes:  Mother Francis Xavier Warde, the Berrigan Bothers, Thomas Merton, Andre Bessette, and Dorothy Day. My personal nominees  are Henry Shelton, Sister Mary Michealeen and Brother Cajetan Cyril. 
My mother admired Dorothy Day and subscribed to the CATHOLIC WORKER  AND  she read aloud to me from Merton's Seven Story Mountain.  So that gives those two  extra  status in my book.
Dorothy Day wrote and cared about the spiritual source of human love and she found  some compelling insights in the Russian Orthodox Theology. 

Dorothy had developed a friendship with Helene Iswolsky, a Russian emigré who had come to know the monks at St. Procopius. The friendship between the two women was natural because of their shared personalist background. Iswolsky was the daughter of the Russian ambassador to France during World War I. Later, in France, she had joined Emmanuel Mounier in his personalist circles after Nicholas Berdyaev had looked her up (they were both Russian emigrés) and invited her to discussion groups at his apartment. It was in France that Iswolsky had become Catholic. (Miller, p. 361). Iswolsky encouraged Dorothy’s interest in St. Procopius and in Eastern liturgy and theology.

Dorothy had been affiliated with the English Benedictine congregation at Portsmouth, Rhode Island, where Ade Bethune, Catholic Worker artist, was a Benedictine Oblate from around 1942 until at least 1946. She later changed the locus of her affiliation to St. Procopius, and it was on April 26, 1955 that Dorothy became an oblate of the Benedictine Abbey in Lisle, Illinois. (Merriman, 101-104).

Among other writers on Eastern, and specifically Russian spirituality, Dorothy quoted on several occasions G. P. Fedotov’s Russian Spirituality. In an article on “The Incompatibility of Love and Violence” in the May 1951 CW she related a scene in that book to Peter Maurin’s reaction when some of the intellectuals or people in charge of CW houses acted against principles of the Catholic Worker, his principles:

On two occasions Peter almost left the Catholic Worker which he had founded. Once when some of the young intellectuals wanted to throw out the “dead wood,” “the rotten lumber,” (meaning the poor) and concentrate on the “message,” on propaganda. And once when two of the men who were in charge of the house struck others.

 In his horror and indignation he spoke strongly. On the first instance he arose from the round table where the discussion was going on and said, “let us go, let us leave this to them,” like the retiring abbot in the writing of G. P. Fedotov’s collection of Russian Spirituality. And on the other occasion he stated strongly that if he ever again saw evidence of violence such as he had just witnessed, he would leave the work.

It may have been Helene Iswolsky who introduced Dorothy to the great Russian theologian, Vladimir Solovyov. (Hans Urs von Balthasar later chose him as one of the models in hisThe Glory of the Lord, Vol. III, Lay Styles (Ignatius Press), and John Paul II points to him as one of the sources from which Catholic thought can be enriched in his encyclical Fides et Ratio.). Helene gave talks at the Worker on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Solovyov, putting together the ideas of these authors. One of the occasions is recounted in “On Pilgrimage,”CW, October 1949:

“The first week in September we had Helene Iswolsky at the farm at Newburgh, giving a course on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Solovyov, the three great Russians. ‘In a field where poison grows,’ she began her course, ‘you will find its antidote. The same soil produces both.’ She spoke of Solovyov who told of the glories of the Incarnation, and is the link between the east and the west. She spoke of the three great men who emphasized the dignity of the human person. ‘To love Russia,’ Berdyaev said, ‘is the way of the cross.’ These three men wrote of the struggle of man towards God and to all of them the golden key which opened the doors of prisons and led out of darkness was the key of love. To listen to such talks is not only to learn more of Christ, but to learn to love the Russians who are truly Christ-bearers in their sufferings and poverty. 

In February 1942 when Dorothy was under attack for her pacifist stand, she spoke of love, the love of Christ which was so different from the starving of whole populations or the bombardment of open cities. She insisted that “love is not killing, it is the laying down of one’s life for one’s friend.” And then she quoted at length from Dostoevsky’s monk, Fr. Zossima. She said she quoted him because the accusation “holier than thou” was also made against the Catholic Workers, who must, like everyone else, admit guilt, participation in the social order which had resulted in the monstrous crime of war.

“Hear Fr. Zossima, in the Brothers Karamazov: ‘Love one another, Fathers,’ he said, speaking to his monks. ‘Love God’s people. Because we have come here and shut ourselves within these walls, we are no holier than those that are outside, but on the contrary, from the very fact of coming here, each of us has confessed to himself that he is worse than others, than all men on earth… And the longer the monk lives in his seclusion, the more keenly he must recognize that. Else he would have no reason to come here.

“Do you remember that little story that Grushenka tells in The Brothers Karamazov? “Once upon a time there was a peasant woman, and a very wicked woman she was. And she died and did not leave a single good deed behind. The devils caught her and plunged her into a lake of fire. So her guardian angel stood and wondered what good deed of hers he could remember to tell God. ‘She once pulled up an onion in her garden,’ said he, and gave it to a beggar woman. And God answered, ‘You take that onion then, hold it out to her on the lake, and let her take hold and be pulled out. And if you pull her out of the lake, let her come to Paradise, but if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is.’ The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her. ‘Come,” said he, “catch hold and I’ll pull you out.’ And he began cautiously pulling her out. He had just pulled her out when the other sinners in the lake, seeing how she was being drawn out, began catching hold of her so as to be pulled out with her. But she was a very wicked woman and she began kicking them. ‘I’m to be pulled out, not you. It’s my onion, not yours.’ As soon as she said that, the onion broke. And the woman fell into the lake and she is burning there to this day. So the angel wept and went away.'”

Dorothy added her comment, “Sometimes in thinking and wondering at God’s goodness to me, I have thought that it was because I gave away an onion. Because I sincerely loved His poor, He taught me to know Him. And when I think of the little I ever did, I am filled with hope and love for all those others devoted to the cause of social justice” (Robert Ellsberg, ed., Selected Writings of Dorothy Day, 1983, 1992, pp. 5-6).

Dorothy especially quoted Solovyov regarding his book, The Meaning of Love. In 1948 she wrote, “Recently I have been reading The Meaning of Love by Solovyov, and he refused to accept the idea, so universally accepted, that love is an illusion, a lure, succumbed to so that the purpose of procreation is fulfilled, and then vanishing” (On Pilgrimage, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1999, p. 199).

Now we are finally getting to why I think Dorothy  Day has something to say that is crucial for  our understanding of the experience of LOVE.

Reflecting on the difficulty of continuing to love when the first special emotion and idealization of the loved one has passed, Dorothy looked to Solovyov for insight.
 She quotes him at length:

“It is well known to everyone that in love there inevitably exists a special idealization of the beloved object, which presents itself to the lover in an entirely different light from that in which outsiders see it. I speak here of light not merely in a metaphorical sense; it is a matter here not only of a special moral and intellectual estimate, but moreover of a special sensuous reception; the lover actually sees, visually received what others do not. And if for him too this light of love quickly fades away, yet does it follow that it was false, that it was only a subjective illusion?"

This is DOROTHY'S  big question?  Was the glimpse of something wonderful in the beloved an illusion?

 Or is it a case of the veil of appearances shifting and the   arrow of love piercing it and allowing lover and beloved to see the God Within for a moment?

Solovyov expands this insight:

“…Each man comprises in himself the image of God. Theoretically and in the abstract, this Divine image is known to us in mind and through mind, but in love it is known in the concrete and in life. And if this revelation of the ideal nature, ordinarily concealed by its material manifestation, is not confined in love to an inward feeling, but at times becomes noticeable also in the sphere of external feelings, then so much greater is the significance we are bound to acknowledge for love as being from the very first the visible restoration of the Divine image in the world of matter….

 You have been very patient to read this far;  I had to re-read this material many times before it sunk in.
--here's a lighter treat--

Today I read a sassy poem by  Frank O'Hara that gives some of the intimate details  of these  divine eruptions--

Travel

Sometimes I know I love you better than all the others I kiss it’s funny but it’s true and I wouldn’t roll from one to the next so fast if you hadn’t knocked them all down like ninepins when you roared by my bed I keep trying to race ahead and catch you at the newest station or whistle stop but you are flighty about schedules and always soar away just as leaning from my taxicab my breath reaches for the back of your neck