Deepest bow of respect and gratitude to Dorothy Day — and to every courageous truth-teller, wisdom-holder, artist and activist, author and visionary. May we all be inspired.
And as I write these words, it comes to me to acknowledge my belief that each of us falls somewhere on the continuum of being more or less aligned in our beliefs and actions with our professed values.
I reflect on my awareness of the many great battles continuing to unfold over whether or not the genocide of Palestinians is genocide, whether or not to stop and turn away 80% or 95% of the desperate refugees at our border, whether or not we should allocate the funding vitally needed for housing and healthcare and addictions and mental health treatment, whether or not to fund preschools and higher education and food for our children, whether or not a climate emergency should be declared and truly addressed, whether or not to continue on the path of endless wars and retaliation, and on and on.
Most of those opposing stepping up to help the poor — and the victims of genocide and war, those displaced by the climate crisis, all those suffering from the many faces of violence and the trauma of, in the words of bell hooks, the “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” we've long lived under — profess to be religious. How can this be?
With the deepest humility and compassion, I see and witness the delusions and disconnect from our hearts and the hearts of others that we humans can unknowingly live with. Too often we come to believe that we are aligned with our deepest values while the reality reflects something very different. I humbly disclose that this has certainly been true for me. For so long, I simply could not see the limitations and empathic impairment embedded in how I was living my life. There was a disconnect between authenticity and reality.
Dorothy Day was among those who modeled what it is to passionately walk her talk and live her values. Such a beautiful and brave soul. And she inspires me to continue to increasingly engage in the hard and courageous work of opening, deepening, and expanding my heart. And to remember that Love is the final word. — Molly
The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?
The older I get, the more I meet people, the more convinced I am that we must only work on ourselves, to grow in grace. The only thing we can do about people is to love them.
Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.
We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.
Those who cannot see Christ in the poor are atheists indeed.
The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.
As we come to know the seriousness of the situation, the war, the racism, the poverty in our world, we come to realize that things will not be changed simply by words or demonstrations. Rather, it's a question of living one's life in a drastically different way.
Don't worry about being effective. Just concentrate on being faithful to the truth.
People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.
What we would like to do is change the world ― make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute--the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words--we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.
Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem that comes up. If we love each other enough, we will bear with each other's faults and burdens. If we love enough, we are going to light that fire in the hearts of others. And it is love that will burn out the sins and hatreds that sadden us. It is love that will make us want to do great things for each other. No sacrifice and no suffering will then seem too much.
The final word is love.
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