My birthday present from my dear husband arrived in the mail today. The Catholic Worker still sells for a penny a copy as it did when it first came out on May 1, 1933. A year's subscription can be obtained for 25 cents via a handwritten request.
"What we do is very little, but it is like the little boy with a few loaves and fishes. Christ took that little and increased it. He will do the rest. What we do is so little we may seem to be constantly failing. But so did He fail. He met with apparent failure on the Cross. But unless the seed fall into the earth and die, there is no harvest. And why must we see results? Our work is to sow. Another generation will be reaping the harvest." -Dorothy Day
Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
From Book III: The Book of Poverty and Death
Rainer Maria Rilke
III,1
It feels as though I make my way
through massive rock
like a vein of ore,
alone, encased.
I am so deep inside it
I can't see the path or any distance:
everything is close
and everything closing in on me
has turned to stone.
Since I don't know enough about pain,
this terrible darkness makes me small.
It it's you, though-
press down hard on me, break in
that I may know the weight of your hand,
and you, the fullness of my cry.
III, 4/5
Lord, the great cities are lost and rotting.
Their time is running out.
The people there live harsh and heavy,
crowded together, weary of their own routines.
Beyond them waits and breathes your earth,
but where they are it cannot reach them.
Their children waste their days
on doorsteps, always in the same shadow.
They don't know that somewhere
wind is blowing through a field of flowers.
The young girls have only strangers to parade
before,
and no one sees them truly;
so, chilled,
they close.
And in back rooms they live out the nagging years
of disappointed motherhood. Their dying is long
and hard to finish: hard to surrender
what you never received.
Their exit has no grace or mystery.
It's a little death, hanging dry and measly
like a fruit inside them that never ripened.
And if you are interested in learning more about the Catholic Worker Movement
And finally from Orthodox author (and a former member of the Catholic Worker House in New York and friend of Dorothy Day), Jim Forest: What I learned about justice from Dorothy Day.
3 comments:
Wow - on both counts:
-that the Catholic Worker is still a penny a paper, and;
-the poem
Beautiful. Happy Birthday! (early or late, I don't know.)
Hugs,
Michelle
Oh my...and here I just crowned Jared "A+ dad." I clearly have no choice but to add "#1 Husband" to that title! What a thoughtful gift indeed!
These lines of your poem gave me chills:
"Lord, the great cities are lost and rotting.
Their time is running out.
The people there live harsh and heavy,
crowded together, weary of their own routines.
Beyond them waits and breathes your earth,
but where they are it cannot reach them."
How relevant they remain. That's a powerful piece of poetry right there.
The Catholic Worker! We enjoy that quite a bit around these parts.
The poem is so timely. Being a little bit self absorbed at the moment, I can't help but apply bits of it to myself. Surely any hard parts of me are being broken.
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