God! We need real saints!
The diaries of Dorothy Day.
The Duty of Delight, the Diaries of Dorothy Day, Edited by Robert Ellsberg. I haven’t read the book but I followed a link on New Oxford Review to a review of the book. The diaries had been sealed for a quarter of a century after her death and include reflections from her experiences while caring for her grandchildren in the mid 1960’s.
Excerpt:
While caring for her daughter’s children for four months in 1964, Day wrote on Sept. 18: “It is hard to write or to think when the record player is blaring with ‘Devil Woman.’ Every morning I wake at 5:30 or 6 to have an hour before I get the kids up for school. Six children rushing thru breakfast, making their lunches, washing, brushing up, make for tumult. To be heard over it is impossible, so I must be content with making the sign of the Cross on each forehead and a plea — Say a little prayer as you go down the road. Just thank God, or say, ‘Jesus, I want to love you.’ ”
On Feb. 19, 1935, the challenges of living with the poor and troubled poured out and she wrote: “As I sit I am weeping — I have been torn recently by people, by things that happen. Surely we are, here in our community, made up of poor lost ones, the abandoned ones, the sick, the crazed and the solitary human beings whom Christ so loved and in whom I see, the terrible anguish, the body of this death.”
Her self-criticism comes through clearly, too. On March 15, 1940, she wrote: “Bertha says I am gruff and indifferent to people. … She rightly points out we are trying to change people’s attitudes, to create understanding, to combat class war. So I must learn to be more cordial to people and overcome that immense sense of weariness and even impatience when people, quite sincerely, tell me how they enjoy my books, how interested they are in my work.
“… I am a weak and faulty vessel to be freighted with so valuable a message as cargo. I am an unprofitable servant and must begin over again right now to change myself. God help me.”
The diaries run from 1934, the year after the Catholic Worker newspaper was founded, to just days before Day’s death in 1980. Ellsberg, who knew Day as a member of the Catholic Worker community in New York from 1975 to 1980, provided background and deleted routine entries. - Source
Some saints were just ordinary people who lived ordinary life extraordinarily well - imperfections and all.
