Everybody I talk to is worried about what they can do. Everybody wants to take some kind of action. What’s happening in the country and the world has so rattled us that we’re desperate to make a difference and we don’t know how.
But I don’t think that’s the real question. I think it’s obvious what we can do, because it’s what we’ve always done. We can give money. We can write letters. We can protest, vote, run for office, create new programs. There are only so many options.
I don’t think this is the real question. I think the real question is our despair. I think we keep worrying about what we can do because deep down we’re afraid there’s nothing we can do. We have this sense of helplessness and despair, about the dying of the planet. about the starving of the children—and then of course there was COVID and that panic and fear–and now, yet again, we’re overwhelmed.
We’re afraid: for others, absolutely. We feel great compassion. But we’re afraid, too, for ourselves. For a moment we’re experiencing just the tiniest hint of what most of the people in the world suffer in fact every day. Nothing has even happened yet, not to most of us, those of us who white and comfortably secure, but we’re afraid it will.
And under the pressure of this new anxiety we’ve temporarily lost our perspective and lost our faith, as we often do in a personal crisis, as if this moment is the only moment, this thing is the only thing, and we’re the only ones who can do anything about it, and we’re powerless. We’re being swept away.
And this is the call. Maybe the good thing about what’s happening now is that it’s calling us back, as all moments call us back. It’s calling us back to our faith: that crucifixion is inevitable and resurrection real. That we can’t put our faith in institutions, however hard we need to work for them. That not everything is up to us. That there’s a love and a tenderness and a goodness in the world beyond all our crudeness and stupidity. That nothing can separate us from the love of Christ, not dictators or presidents or even the end of the world.
Blessed are they who mourn, for they have faced the truth. Their illusions have been stripped away. Blessed are they, for they shall be comforted, for death is not the worst thing or the only thing or the last thing, and to say this isn’t to make an excuse for not acting but to explain why we are. Believing this is what gives us strength and our actions purpose.
Maybe the most important thing we can do is believe.
The great social activist Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker’s movement, kept a journal over those many years, and what she says there has such resonance for us, it means more to us, because of who she was and what she did.
What strikes me most in her journals is her humility and her realism. You see this again and again. “I need to overcome a sense of my own impotence,” she wrote once, after struggling for years to make a difference—struggling with the recalcitrance and lack of gratitude in the poor she also loved, struggling with the indifference and bias of the politicians and church leaders who refused to help:
I need to overcome a sense of my own failure, and an impatience at others that goes with it. Such a sense of defeat comes from expecting too much of one’s self, also from a sense of pride. More and more I realize how good God is to me to send me discouragements, failures, antagonisms. The only way to proceed is to remember that God’s ways are not our ways. To bear our own burdens, do our work as best we can, and not fret because we cannot do more or do another’s work.
What should we do? Bear our own burdens. Do the work we’ve been given day to day, the best we can. Not fret because we can’t do more. Let go.
What should we do? Recognize that our discouragements and failures are in their own way a terrible grace, continual lessons in our own limitations, in our need for God, for grace. “The only way to proceed is to remember that God’s ways are not our ways.” The only way. If we trust only in ourselves, we will end up in despair.
“Have no anxiety at all,” as St. Paul says in the magnificent passage in Philippians:
but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard you hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
And Paul says this in prison. Later he was beheaded, the tradition tells us. Do what you can. Say what you think. Be willing to go to prison. And pray, pray always—and things will still be as messy and heartbreaking and unfair as they’ve always been. You won’t necessarily get what you pray for. You’ll have to suffer. But “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will keep your hearts in minds in Christ Jesus.” Peace: deeper than what we can explain, deeper than governments, deeper even than the death of the world, the death of the galaxies.
Years later, on Easter Sunday, when she was 71, Day describes another moment in her life, a moment of dying and rising again.
Always when I awaken in the morning it is to a half-dead condition, a groaning in every bone, a lifelessness, a foretaste of death, a sense of quiet terror, which hangs over us all. I turn desperately to pray. “O God make haste to help me,” and there are always those magnificent psalms, the official prayer of the church. And I am saved.
We never escape from the terror, we are never free of the ache in our bones, especially as we grow older, and we have to face that and acknowledge that, because it’s only then that we can do what we most have to do, and that’s turn to God. We can reach out then for the strength and hope we need—through the psalms, for Day, these magnificent poems, with their cries of joy and grief.
And then the entry continues:
This consciousness of salvation comes to me afresh each day. I am turned around, away from the world of sin and death to the reality of God, our loving father. In those moments “all the way to heaven is heaven” to me, as St. Catherine of Siena said. The sun has risen, the air is warmed, the birds are singing outside, and I go outside to sit by the dead-calm river, which flows by. The testimony of our hearts shows the truth. We experience, no matter how briefly, the sense of salvation.
The testimony of our hearts shows us the truth that must be the basis of all our actions, these quiet moments, these moments in our own given lives, when, however briefly, we experience the reality of our salvation.
What do we do if we want to attempt anything like the work that Dorothy Day undertook? How can we serve the poor? How can we fight against the lies and stupidities of our leaders?
We have to go down to the river. The dead-calm river, always flowing by.
Be not afraid, Jesus tells us his disciples, and us. They wanted to make him into a political leader. They wanted him to end the violence and oppression in their own political system, and he refused. He said, my kingdom is not of this world. He said he must die, he must be powerless, and we must take up our cross, too, and follow him, and apparently he really meant that. Maybe we’ve been taking this less literally than we should, less physically than we should. Sometimes something really happens to us, and to others, in our bodies, in the world. In the end, after all, we die.
Is this what we most fear? Is this what we keep blocking out of our minds? Death? But death is inevitable. We’re right: there’s nothing we can do in the end but believe, or not.
There’s nothing new here, now. We’re only being reminded.
“I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete,” Jesus says, and this is on the night before the crucifixion, and what he’s told them is that he will die. He will die on a cross. Imagine the fear in that upper room. Imagine the faces of the disciples in their anxiety and astonishment. And yet Jesus says, joy. Joy.
“Put no trust in princes”, Psalm 146 says, “in mortals in whom there is no help. / Take their breath, they return to clay / and their plans that day come to nothing.” We all return to clay, our plans come to nothing, and that’s a good thing, that’s good news, because God remains. Because our “hope is in the Lord,” “who alone made heaven and earth.” Because this isn’t all up to us. It’s the Lord who “is just to those who are oppressed.” It is the Lord “who gives bread to the hungry” and the Lord “who sets prisoners free,” and the Lord “will reign forever,” “from age to age.”
This is the faith we are called to come back to, every day, in every crisis, and even when there isn’t crisis, when there is just the day.
Even the post-resurrection experiences are fleeting, local, homey. Jesus doesn’t come back and establish a new government devoted to freedom and justice forevermore. He broils fish on the shore of the morning lake. He falls in beside them on the road. On the day of the Resurrection Mary Magdalene mistakes him for the gardener. Then he vanishes. He’s gone. We can’t hold onto him.
Is this what we are afraid of? That we just have to live with uncertainty? That we just have to live with the way things are? That we just have to live with our own mixed up and conflicting feelings?
Are we afraid of our joy? We can’t control it. It’s always a surprise. It’s fleeting. It doesn’t make sense. We can’t be sure of it.
But this is what we’ve been given, these quiet moments, these ordinary moments, even these moments of anxiety and despair, and the call is to accept them, trust in them, be grateful for them, stake our lives on them, because the peace of God surpasses all understanding. The river is always flowing.
Is it wrong to talk of heaven? Of the life to come? Isn’t that an excuse not to fight here and now?
Something there is that remains. Something vast, and something right in front of us. Something miraculous, and something perfectly ordinary, plain as day. We can’t prove that the Resurrection really happened or even know what the Resurrection really was, but we know that the early Christians were remarkably courageous and optimistic. Many ancient historians, many who were not Christian, recount stories of their joy. Something happened, and it’s always happening. All the way to heaven is heaven, and to say this isn’t to evade political and social action but to justify it. Heaven is the reason we act. Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven: heaven is our justification, heaven here and now and heaven in some unimaginable future. Be not afraid. I am with you always.
A hundred years from now it won’t make any difference anyway, as my dad used to say. In 10,000 years we’ll still be shining like the sun.
When in 1980, at the age of 83, Dorothy Day died alone in her room, this simple, traditional prayer from St. Ephrem was found next to her bed, tucked into her final journal.
Lord and master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, faintheartedness, lust of power, and idle talk. Give rather to your servant a spirit of chastity, humility, patience and love. Yes, oh Lord and King, grant that I may see my own faults and not to judge my brothers and sisters, for Thou art blest from all ages to ages.
It’s remarkable to me, and encouraging, that this wise and holy and courageous woman would feel the need to pray this simple prayer even after all she had done. She was still struggling. This is never easy. Our hearts are always broken. All we can do at the end of the day, and the beginning, is turn to God.
Dorothy Day is our model, among many others. She shows us the way, as many others do. There’s nothing new here. It has always been so. What the Israelites professed came out of centuries of injustice. Jesus was a political martyr among all the other things he was, and he says, my peace I give you, my peace I leave you.
What can we do? What should we do? Pray for chastity, humility, patience and love. See our own faults. Not judge others. Give praise to the Lord of all the ages. What can we do? Rejoice and be glad, for this is our duty, the hardest thing of all, to rejoice in the face of all that we see, to stand fast, to keep remembering who we really are. This is our vocation and our disciple, this is our duty, what Dorothy Day called the duty of delight.