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    Reflections during Advent: Dorothy Day on Prayer, Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience
    Reflections during Advent: Dorothy Day on Prayer, Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience
    Reflections during Advent: Dorothy Day on Prayer, Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience
    Ebook58 pages57 minutes

    Reflections during Advent: Dorothy Day on Prayer, Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience

    By Dorothy Day and Lawrence S. Cunningham

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    About this ebook

    In his September 2015 speech to the United States Congress, Pope Francis credited American journalist Dorothy Day (1897–1980), cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, for her deep faith and social activism. Day’s devotion to her Catholic faith and its traditions reverberated through a series of four reflections published during Advent 1966 in The Ave Maria magazine, a Catholic weekly founded in 1865 by Rev. Edward F. Sorin, C.S.C. These reflections, available for the first time as an eBook collection with a new reader’s guide and an excerpt from “On Pilgrimage,” are as important today as they were fifty years ago.

    Written a year after the close of the Second Vatican Council, Dorothy Day’s Reflections during Advent address a Catholic Church in a time of tremendous upheaval. Catholic devotions fell out of practice. People sought God separate from Church life. Seminarians, novices, and vowed religious were turning away from religious life. American affluence and materialism seemed to know no bounds. It was a time in the Church not unlike the world today.

    “One of the most intriguing things about Dorothy Day was how she managed to harmonize a radical social vision with the most orthodox and traditional kind of Catholic piety,” writes Lawrence S. Cunningham, the John A. O’Brien professor of theology (emeritus) at the University of Notre Dame, in his introduction to the collection. “Her views on society would cause the most ‘progressive’ Democratic voter to pause, but her spiritual life was fueled by her fidelity as a Benedictine oblate to the Liturgy of the Hours, her meditations on sacred scripture, her love of the lives of the saints, and her assiduous participation in the Eucharistic liturgy.”

    Day begins her series of four reflections with a powerful witness to prayer, the Rosary, the Angelus, and her devotion to the Blessed Mother. Then she turns her attention to the three evangelical counsels of the Catholic Church—vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—providing insights into a Catholic way of life that benefits all, whether lay person or religious. The reflections exhibit Day’s personal and rousing writing style with stories that fans of her 1955 landmark autobiography, The Long Loneliness, will welcome as captivating insights into the continuation of her life story. The reflections are told in her unique voice and filled with stories about Day’s childhood, conversion to Catholicism, devotional life, Catholic Worker communities, work with Peter Maurin, and much more. With each word, you will feel her dedication to the compassionate defense of the dignity of every human person, especially the poor and outcast of society.

    This work is a must-read for every Advent season, a timeless reminder of Day’s witness to faith that echoes Pope Francis’s words in his historic address to Congress: “Her social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed, were inspired by the Gospel, her faith, and the example of the saints.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAve Maria Press
    Release dateNov 13, 2015
    ISBN9781594714160
    Reflections during Advent: Dorothy Day on Prayer, Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience
    Author

    Dorothy Day

    ""Dorothy Day, is a modern Catholic saint in the tradition of St. Francis. Her book is an absorbingly well-written series of pictures of her work and that of those she has gathered around her connection with the Catholic Worker, its hospitality house and its community farm. I rejoice with the new hope for mankind because of the kind of work that she and her associates are doing.""- Norman Thomas

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      Book preview

      Reflections during Advent - Dorothy Day

      These essays were first published in The Ave Maria magazine from November 26 to December 17, 1966.

      Advent Is a Time of Waiting is excerpted from On Pilgrimage. New York: Catholic Worker Books, 1948.

      ____________________________________

      © 1966, 2015 by Ave Maria Press, Inc.

      Introduction © 2015 by Lawrence S. Cunningham

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews, without written permission from Ave Maria Press®, Inc., P.O. Box 428, Notre Dame, IN 46556, 1-800-282-1865.

      Founded in 1865, Ave Maria Press is a ministry of the United States Province of Holy Cross.

      www.avemariapress.com

      E-book: ISBN-13 978-1-59471-416-9

      Cover image ©Thinkstock.

      Cover and text design by David Scholtes.

      Contents

      Introduction by Lawrence S. Cunningham

      One: Searching for Christ

      Two: The Meaning of Poverty

      Three: Chastity

      Four: Obedience

      Epilogue: Advent Is a Time of Waiting

      Reader’s Guide

      Introduction

      One of the most intriguing things about Dorothy Day was how she managed to harmonize a radical social vision with the most orthodox and traditional kind of Catholic piety. Her views on society would cause the most progressive Democratic voter to pause, but her spiritual life was fueled by her fidelity as a Benedictine oblate to the Liturgy of the Hours, her meditations on sacred scripture, her love of the lives of the saints, and her assiduous participation in the Eucharistic liturgy.

      These meditations written for the season of Advent and published in The Ave Maria in November and December of 1966 are redolent both of her rock-solid Catholic piety and her unwavering commitment to living for and with the poor. It is also clear that her cultural reference points were wider than a deep commitment to the traditional sources of Catholic piety; being nourished on great literature, music, and art was a context for her well-centered spirituality. She was a lover of the Russian classics and her frequent citation of them, especially her deep commitment to the writings of Dostoevsky, is clear on almost every page of these essays. What she found in those writings was a burning love for Christ and a fierce rejection of any violence, especially violence directed at the most vulnerable, themes which were reflected in her own life and writings.

      The topics she takes up in these meditations are such traditional ones as the Blessed Mother, fidelity to Christ, obedience, and chastity. These are themes that might appear off-putting to those who laud liberty and a certain personal freedom of choice. Day, however, not only can breathe new life into these themes but she can demonstrate their paradoxical freshness. Being an obedient person in the Church, according to Day, brings not subservience but an exhilarating freedom within which to live. These kinds of paradoxes reflect the deeper paradoxes rooted in the Gospel itself: to give up all is to have all; to deny oneself is to experience love at its summit.

      To read these meditations slowly is to encounter a vision that harmonizes a wide culture, a fundamental Catholic spirituality that never seems pious, and a deep concern for the other. Even though the term is not fashionable today, Day represents a kind of Christian humanism—a way of life that is incarnational, taking seriously our insertion into the gritty reality of the world in which we find ourselves and simultaneously oriented to that not yet that is to be fully realized in Christ. In that sense, hers is an Advent spirituality, nourished in hope with the great promises of the prophets, like Isaiah, who we read in this season while we keep our eyes on the coming of the Christ who is the fulfillment of every human desire. Reading these pages of Dorothy Day, I could not help but recall those wonderful lines from Charles Wesley that we often sing in morning

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