Vigils Reading

WE SCARCELY KNOW OURSELVES

From the writing of Servant of God Dorothy Day5

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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 <one> 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 <humankind>… 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 <humanity>, 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.

5 Day, Dorothy. By Little and By Little – The Selected Writings of Dorothy Day. Ed.

Robert Ellsberg. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983. 4-7, 9.13