Books We Love: Along Comes A Saint – Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day’s autobiography is a candid rendition of the faith-based community that she created together with the French Catholic theologian and writer Peter Maurin. The story of her life reveals the  paradoxical struggle between her profound loneliness and intense joy. The two emotions of loneliness and joy are never at cross purposes and instead hang in the balance, protected by the bliss of knowing God.  Aside from being an inspiration for our own spiritual journeys, Dorothy Day’s astute descriptions of Socialism, Communism, Libertarianism, Democracy, Pacifism,  and Catholicism clearly articulate the struggle between labor and capitalism, poverty and greed, and good and evil. The book is not always smoothly written, which can sometimes be a distraction, especially when Day uses her own private lexicon and syntax to craft clumsy sentences. Overall, the work is as imperfect as we all are as human beings. As a final takeaway, we get more than a glimpse into the mission underlying the Catholic Worker; in the words of Peter Maurin: “We want to make the kind of society where it’s easier for people to be good.”