A Reflection in Three Parts
Part Two

Thinking of the power of awe reminds me of another one of my spiritual heroes, Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. A fallible and faithful friend of God, day-by-day for fifty years she fed, clothed, sheltered, and treated with dignity and reverence the destitute of New York City. I have always been struck by and taken great delight in the fact that Day’s account of her gradual religious conversion in her autobiography The Long Loneliness appears in a section titled “Natural Happiness.” How noteworthy and provocative it is to know that a woman some conservative Catholics and many fundamentalist Christians would consider to be the least likely and most unworthy of God’s friend* found her way to God not through the tactics of fear but rather through the beauty of the natural world. This beauty was opened up to her by her common-law husband of four years, Forster Batterham, as well as through the earthy agency of the respiration of love, the gratefulness for good neighbors and good friends, the awe of a pregnancy she once thought impossible, and the ensuing birth and joy of her daughter.

We live in a time when hell-fire and brimstone preachers have migrated from street corners and soap boxes to a plethora of Cable channels on TV where they hawk their fire insurance and where the smoother televangelists omnisciently and oddly threaten their viewers with damnation as a way of peddling their narrow understanding of salvation and a relationship with God. Cock-sure they are vendors of God’s word and keepers of divine truth, how twisted, how telling, how sad that they lead with fear instead of awe, corruption instead of creation, finger pointing instead of inviting hand, sin instead of blessing, guilt instead of grace, depravity instead of extravagant love, and judgment instead of joy.

Although Day was later embarrassed by and remorseful for the mistakes and transgressions of her youth, it was not some finger wagging preacher a la Jonathan Edwards admonishing “sinners in the hands of an angry God” who set in motion her transformation. It was no threatening condemnation for her “disorderly life” that awakened Dorothy and brought her to faith and joy. It was her move “down to the country” where she lived with Forster from 1925-1929 in a little beach bungalow she bought on Staten Island with what remained of the $5,000 she made from selling the movie rights to her first book The Eleventh Virgin. Here, her peace and happiness increased and caused her to begin consciously to pray. In The Long Loneliness she describes a common scene on the beach in the late afternoon which evokes in Dorothy an increasingly regular sense of quiet beauty and happiness:

The waves lapped the shore, tinkling among the shells and pebbles . . . Down the beach, the Belgians were working, loading rock into a small cart which looked like a tumbril, drawn by a bony white horse. They stopped as though in prayer, outlined against the brilliant sky, and as I watched, the chapel bell at St. Joseph’s rang the Angelus.** I found myself praying, praying with thanksgiving, praying with open eyes while I watched the workers on the beach and the sunset, and listened to the sound of the waves and the scream of the snowy gulls.

About those days and her new inclination for prayer she writes, “It is so hard to say how this delight in prayer grew on me.” Each day as she walked to the village to get her mail, Dorothy found herself praying. Surprised, she took an inventory: “Do I really believe? Whom am I praying to? . . . And over and over again in my mind that phrase was repeated jeeringly, ‘Religion is the opiate of the people.’” But the inventory that moved her at first from surprise to shame to scorn, as she notes, eventually revealed: “I am praying because I am happy, not because I am unhappy. I did not turn to God in unhappiness, in grief, in despair—to get consolation, to get something from Him.” She continues:

And encouraged that I was praying because I wanted to thank Him, I went on praying. No matter how dull the day, how long the walk seemed, if I felt sluggish at the beginning of the walk, the words I had been saying insinuated themselves into my heart before I had finished, so that on the trip back I neither prayed nor thought but was filled with exultation.

It is hard to deny the motivational power of fear. Hellfire and brimstone preachers have used it to scare listeners straight for years, shamelessly conflating damnation, salvation, disregard for this world, heaven, and God. But if in our attempt to understand the ineffable One we anthropomorphize God, is this the kind of God with whom one wants to be in relationship? As I once asked a directee in spiritual direction who had been deeply wounded by both the perpetuation of this mean, threatening view of God and the directee’s unquestioning internalization of it, “And the good news of that is what?”

Saved by Beauty
Are not the sublimity of creation—the beauty of the night sky, the smells and sounds of the sea, a sense of kinship with the earth—the centripetal and centrifugal force of human love, the blessing of good neighbors, good friends, good meals, the surprise of pregnancy, the mystery of birth, and the awe and gratefulness evoked by them, a more concordant and efficacious means of awakening people to the presence of the Holy One and the Divine love that set it all in motion? Simone Weil (1909-1943), the French philosopher, writes: “In all that awakens within us the pure and authentic sentiment of beauty, there is, truly, the presence of God. There is a kind of incarnation of God in the world, of which beauty is the sign.”

From her early childhood, Dorothy had been a city girl. And yet, even then, intentionally pushing her baby brother John in the carriage toward the poorest, dreariest neighborhoods, past the taverns, stockyards, and slaughterhouses of Chicago’s West Side made famous by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle, she caught hints of holiness springing forth from the unlikeliest of places like saxifrage splitting rock. Into her purview, arousing one of her senses, nature attracted her attention with simple incarnations of beauty:

There were tiny flower gardens and vegetable patches in the yards. Often there were rows of corn, stunted but still recognizable, a few tomato plants, and always the vegetables were bordered with flowers, . . . all sizes and shades with their pungent odor. . . The odor of geranium leaves, tomato plants, marigolds; the smell of lumber, of tar, of roasting coffee; the smell of good bread and rolls and coffee cake coming from the small German bakeries. Here was enough beauty to satisfy me.

A voracious reader from a family of readers, Dorothy loved the Russian writers. She read the stories of Gorki and Tolstoy and everything of Dostoevsky. So she was familiar with one of Dostoevsky’s characters questioning Prince Myshkin in The Idiot about a statement he was reputed to have made that “the world will be saved by beauty.” Now, in this second of three sections of her autobiography, Day recalls how as a young woman in her early thirties, after having excised religion and God from her life in college, the salvific lure of beauty drew her near and re-membered her to God. Her love for Forster and his love for nature, were bringing Dorothy to natural happiness and faith despite Forster’s displeasure with the latter. Dorothy writes:

He used to insist on walks no matter how cold or rainy the day, and this dragging me away from my books, from my lethargy, into the open, into the country, made me begin to breathe. If breath is life, then I was beginning to be full of it because of him. I was filling my lungs with it, walking on the beach, resting on the pier beside him while he fished, rowing with him in the calm bay, walking through fields and woods—a new experience entirely for me, one which brought me to life, and filled me with joy.

Rabbi Abraham Heschel insists “the world is an allusion,” not an illusion as some folks maintain. Those persons who are awake, those who allow themselves to be moved by the fragrance of marigolds or the crashing of waves or the simple sublimity of birdsong and the green sanctuary of the woods, sense the “spiritual suggestiveness of reality.” As Weil suggested, the more susceptible Dorothy became to the signs of beauty all around her, the more broken open she felt to the presence of God. Day writes:

It was all very well to love God in His works, in the beauty of His creation which was crowned for me by the birth of my child. Forster made the physical world come alive for me and had awakened in my heart a flood of gratitude. The final object of this love and gratitude was God. No human creature could receive and contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore.

In and through the incarnations of beauty and the wonder and awe it unleashed in her, Dorothy found new life, genuine joy, and the seeds of a faith that would bear much fruit. Her deep gratefulness for the natural happiness she experienced during this transformational time in her life fostered her desire not only to practice the works of mercy but also what she later called the “duty to delight.” Duty, not as the pressure from some external authority, but rather from within, as obedience to her deepest intuition and wisdom, as fidelity to what it means to be human, to be alive, to be a yare hashem, one who is in awe of God and drenched with delight.

To be continued . . .

* In her twenties Day had a series of lovers, was married and divorced, best friends with communists and members of the radical left, worked on the staff of socialist publications, resisted all wars, smoke and drank generously, and had an abortion.

** The Angelus is a Catholic devotion dating back to the 11^th century. It commemorates the mystery of the incarnation, the Annunciation of the angel Gabriel, and Mary’s fiat. Traditionally, the Angelus is prayed three times a day and is signaled by a specific patterned ringing of the church bells which calls people to prayer.