Easter Weekday

WE SCARCELY KNOW OURSELVES
From the writings of Servant of God Dorothy Day 3
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Much as we want to, we do not really know ourselves. Do we really want
to see ourselves as God sees us, or even as our fellow human beings see us?
Could we bear it, weak as we are?… We do not want to be given that clear inward
vision which discloses to us our most secret faults. In the Psalms there is that
prayer “Deliver me from my secret sins.”… They were what I read most when I
was in jail… I read with a sense of coming back to something that I had lost.
There was an echoing in my heart. And how can anyone who has known human
sorrow and human joy fail to respond to these words?

Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice. Let thy
ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication. If thou, O Lord, wilt mark
iniquities: Lord who shall stand it. For with thee there is merciful forgiveness…

All through those weary first days in jail when I was in solitary
confinement, the only thoughts that brought comfort to my soul were those lines
in the Psalms that expressed the terror and misery of man suddenly stricken and
abandoned. Solitude and hunger and weariness of spirit – these sharpened my
perceptions so that I suffered not only my own sorrow but the sorrows of those
about me. I was no longer myself. I was mankind… The sorrows of the world
encompassed me. I was like one gone down into the pit. Hope had forsaken me…
And yet if it were not the Holy Spirit that comforted me, how could I have been
comforted, how could I have endured, how could I have lived in hope?…

“What glorious hope!” Mauriac writes. “There are all those who will
discover that their neighbor is Jesus himself, although they belong to the mass of
those who do not know Christ or who have forgotten Him… Even some of those
who think they hate Him have consecrated their lives to Him; for Jesus is
disguised and masked in the midst of men, hidden among the poor, among the
sick, among prisoners, among strangers. Many who serve Him officially have
never known who He was, and many who do not even know His name will hear
on the last day the words that open to them the gates of joy. ‘Those children
were I, and I those working men. I wept on the hospital bed. I was that murderer
in his cell whom you consoled.’”

But always the glimpses of God came most when I was alone. Objectors
cannot say that it was fear of loneliness and solitude and pain that made me turn
to Him. It was in those few years when I was alone and most happy that I found
Him. I found Him at last through joy and thanksgiving, not through sorrow. Yet
how can I say that either? Better let it be said that I found Him through His poor,
and in a moment of joy I turned to Him… If Christ established His Church on
earth with Peter as its rock, that faulty one who denied Him three times, who fled
from Him when he was in trouble, then I, too, wanted a share in that tender
compassionate love that is so great…

The experiences that I have had are more or less universal. Suffering,
sadness, repentance, love, we all have known these. They are easiest to bear
when one remembers their universality, when we remember that we are all
members or potential members of the Mystical Body of Christ. A conversion is a
lonely experience. We do not know what is going on in the depths of the heart
and soul of another. We scarcely know ourselves.

3 Day, Dorothy. By Little and By Little – The Selected Writings of Dorothy Day. Ed.
Robert Ellsberg. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983. 4-7, 9.