Vigils Reading

Here and Now5
From the Selected Writings of Servant of God Dorothy Day

Sometimes the only thing that keeps a woman going is the necessity of taking care of her young. She cannot sink into lethargy and despair because the young ones are dragging at her skirts, clamoring for something – food, clothing, shelter, occupation. She is carried outside herself. She is saved by childbearing, as it says in the Old Testament; she has a rule of life which involves others and she will be saved in spite of herself…The desire to nourish, to bring forth, is strong in…women.

…We want to be happy, we want others to be happy, we want to see some of this joy of life which children have, we want to see people intoxicated with God, or just filled with the good steady joy of knowing that Christ is King and that God loves us as a father loves his children, as a bridegroom loves his bride, and that eye has not seen nor ear heard what God hath prepared for us!…

We are called to be saints… and we might as well get over our bourgeois fear of the name. We might also get used to recognizing the fact that there is some of the saint in all of us. Inasmuch as we are growing, putting off the old man and putting on Christ, there is some of the saint, the holy, the divine right there.

…we believe that spiritual action is the hardest of all – to praise and worship God, to thank Him, to petition Him for our brothers, to repent our sins and those of others. This is action, just as the taking of cities is action, as revolution is action, as the Corporal Works of Mercy are action. And just to lie in the sun and let God work on you is to be sitting in the light of the Sun of Justice, and the growth will be there, and joy will grow and spread to others. That is why I like to use so often that saying of St. Catherine of Siena: “All the Way to heaven is Heaven, because He said I am the Way