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

THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING! THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING!!

'TIL I GAIN CONTROL AGAIN

I must admit that all my life I have felt a strange affinity with Russian writers. I discovered Tolstoy somehow in my 13th summer.
Someone  dared me to read  the entire WAR AND PEACE.  I  guess I was such a braggart about my reading that I brought that kind of challenge out of them.

 But once I got started I could not stop. I had never known the way that  a writer like Tolstoy makes you feel when he brings you into another time and place. I can still recall feeling jolted when I would close the book and was startled to find I was  still in Pawtucket. It would take me a minute or more to adjust to the change of time and place and character.
 I loved Tolstoy so much and went onto Anna Karenina, a novel that  rocked my soul and which  I craved so much that for many years afterwards I read it again every summer. Each time I hoped that the ending would be different. I hated the fact that Anna  jumped in front of that train.
 I went from Tolstoy to Dostoyevsky and  I was amazed by the way he presented debate and argument in a novel. I was completely surprised by the character of Prince Myshkin in THE IDIOT.
Here is a character that is so good and the world does not know what to do with him.  He echoes to me Patrick Pearse's Irish understanding of  both the wickedness of the world and the perfection of Jesus.They become types of Holy Fools like Don Quixote --those who take Christ at his Word.
MOST TAKE HIM WITH A GRAIN OF SALT. Like that rich young man who went away sad when Jesus advised him to see all he had and give to the poor and follow HIM.
Such  spiritual aspirations linked to such a profoundly  negative sense of the wickedness of the world  display the deep current that flows between the Russian and Irish cultures and links their souls.
Even Yeats had to  admit it in his poem  about the Easter Rising:

And what if excess of love   

Bewildered them till they died?   

I write it out in a verse—

MacDonagh and MacBride   

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:   

A terrible beauty is born.

My love for the Russian soul and their shared sense of the terrible beauty that  human sacrifice brings to the world  was sealed when 
I finally met Chekhov--that was in college. 

I still cannot  read or hear the final speech by Sonya without  feeling the devastation. When I saw Uncle Vanya on Broadway with Julie Christie and George C. Scott I could not leave the theater for  a half hour after the final curtain :

SONYA: What can we do? We must live out our lives. [A pause] Yes, we shall live, Uncle Vanya. We shall live all through the endless procession of days ahead of us, and through the long evenings. We shall bear patiently the burdens that fate imposes on us. We shall work without rest for others, both now and when we are old. And when our final hour comes, we shall meet it humbly, and there beyond the grave, we shall say that we have known suffering and tears, that our life was bitter. And God will pity us. Ah, then, dear, dear Uncle, we shall enter on a bright and beautiful life. We shall rejoice and look back upon our grief here. A tender smile -- and -- we shall rest. I have faith, Uncle, fervent, passionate faith. We shall rest. We shall rest. We shall hear the angels. We shall see heaven shining like a jewel. We shall see evil and all our pain disappear in the great pity that shall enfold the world. Our life will be as peaceful and gentle and sweet as a caress. I have faith; I have faith. [Wiping away her tears] My poor, poor Uncle Vanya, you are crying! [Weeping] You have never known what it is to be happy, but wait, Uncle Vanya, wait! We shall rest. We shall rest. We shall rest.
Read more at http://www.monologuearchive.com/c/chekhov_010.html#MFJTACdy4zR6RKT1.99
  
There is something so contrary about the Russsian soul. Like those that Synge celebrates in his tragedy RIDERS TO THE SEA  It does not deny the reality and it does not hate life--it endures all,

The poet Lermontov captures the impulse in both the Russian and Irish heroes to seek the tempest and to run towards the fight--not away,

A single sail is bleaching brightly
Upon the waves caressing hand,
What seeks it in a stranger country?
Why did it leave its native strand?
When winds pipe high, loud roar the billows
And with a crashing bends the mast,
It does not shun its luckless fortune,
Nor haste to port before the blast.
To-day the sea is clear as azure,
The sun shines gaily, faint the wind--
But it revolting, looks for tempest,
And dreams in storms its peace to find!
Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov

 I did not forget the great Russian poets like Mayakovsky and  Yevtuschenko. or the brilliant work of Anna Akhmatova. She asks  a question that many of us are asking these days and maybe all older people ask who have felt out of touch with the  new times and generation--

Why Is This Age Worse...?

Why is this age worse than earlier ages?

In a stupor of grief and dread

have we not fingered the foulest wounds

and left them unhealed by our hands?

In the west the falling light still glows,

and the clustered housetops glitter in the sun,

but here Death is already chalking the doors with crosses,

and calling the ravens, and the ravens are flying in.

Translated by Stanley Kunitz (with Max Hayward)

In a  detailed interview  in The Paris Review, Yevtuschenko strikes a similar note and theme:

Alas, I myself belong to a less exalted poetic tradition. My verse is usually dictated by contemporary events, by sudden emotions—but such is the nature of my talent … when I am deeply moved, I am prompted to pour my feelings out at once in verse.” As he spoke, Yevtushenko got up, moved around the room, sat in turn in every one of various overstuffed armchairs, settling eventually on the dark-blue velvet settee, his long legs, crossed, stretched far into the room. But soon he stood up again to recite a poem of his own, one of several dedicated to Mayakovsky:  

What is it destroyed Mayakovsky,

Put a revolver in his hand?

To him with his great voice, his nobility,

If only there had been offered some tenderness.

—Living people are such a nuisance

Tenderness is for those safely dead.

The idea of the "safely dead: certainly haunts the Irish soul as well. I see a strange  and deep connection . So many  people in Irish and Russian history that are vilified when they are  alive and causing controversy are deeply revered and celebrated when they are "safely dead."

CASE IN POINT-------BOBBY SANDS, MP.